The Gannet and Skerryman
How did Skerryman make Shetland? This way of it shows why a
gannet’s face is the colour of tobacco-stain and why Skerryman is always cold.
Gannet’s greedy. Or some folk, seeing the boats come in with half
catches, say he’s starving. And Gannet knows the last big halibut
is sculling around the ocean floor. He dives, you know how, a
falling sword; screwing down through the water he gapes his beak
and snaps it shut. But he snips open the seabed and lava elbows
out, and piles out in triple chins, and kicks out - lava on lava until
there crowns an island and a shivering mannie: Skerryman,
pushed prematurely from the earth’s hot gut, sorrowful, shivering,
basalt-black.
gannet’s face is the colour of tobacco-stain and why Skerryman is always cold.
Gannet’s greedy. Or some folk, seeing the boats come in with half
catches, say he’s starving. And Gannet knows the last big halibut
is sculling around the ocean floor. He dives, you know how, a
falling sword; screwing down through the water he gapes his beak
and snaps it shut. But he snips open the seabed and lava elbows
out, and piles out in triple chins, and kicks out - lava on lava until
there crowns an island and a shivering mannie: Skerryman,
pushed prematurely from the earth’s hot gut, sorrowful, shivering,
basalt-black.
Page(s) 39
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