Beinn Eighe. (A hymn to the Silence).

The mountains loom large and lonely

Towering into lofty skies.

Their peaks are craggy, their ridges sharp,

Their gullies yet full of gleaming snow.

The mountain trail leads us deeper

Into their embrace as we penetrate

The mystic silence of solemnity.

The shallow, weedy pools glimmer

With diamond light as if brimming

With glittering, dancing stars.

This is the realm of the majestic golden eagle

But the sky today is only full of golden sunlight,

The ghosts of mist and the skylarks’song.

After a trek we reach the loch, placid

Beneath a horseshoe of mountains

With a jumble of boulders and scree

At their base. From the mirrored water

A stream spills down a staircase of rock,

White and joyous into the valley below.

This is a silent place full of half-remembered spells,

Portents and lingering memories:

Beauty and tragedy live side by side here

In this hallowed place, like two sides

Of a coin forever spinning on its axis.

The litter of wreckage has morphed itself

Into the landscape, merged with the stones

At the mountains’ feet where winter hid its secrets

For so long after: another bomber

That never arrived home and eight airmen

Now frozen for eternity in old photographs.

I heave strange patterned rocks onto a flat-topped boulder

And build a small cairn, pay homage to memory,

Build something for the wind, for the sun

And the driving rain and snow; for a starry night

And the moon’s cold embrace.

I build it for the lingering spirits of the place,

The frailty of human-kind and for perpetuity,

Then I murmur a hymn for the silence.