Too quiet to be silence
Meet me in the wilderness,
Sweet unrelenting quietness,
That found me softly and left me bliss,
A peacefulness I won’t dismiss.
Too quiet to be silence.
And when the wind stops, we stop.
Won’t risk the moment for words, but if
to whisper, kindly, how quiet it is.
Find me beside the mountain burn
and all the sound is weather,
Stop – don’t talk,
Me, you and myself will walk
All three just one amongst the heather.
the longest glen
the longest glen
falls off the map, just past the dam
where lochs diverge
branching into the infinite.
in places, it is no older
than you or I
in others it is the passing of time
meandering through the eternal.
and still an oak thinks its autumn
throws its leaves to the rakings
of men downriver
midway: a little wire bridge sways
through the parallels, strikes across
like a path in the writing.
but the longest glen
is indivisible. and will shake you off
long before the edge of the Earth.
Glen Douchary
Two ruins, fallen, stand
amongst bleatings of sheep
looking lost as to peat
all dried out.
A thistle grows
where the river was
unwanted,
desperate as coincidence.
Still, the crag stands guard
looking down
on it all
smiling and falling
apart.
Innes Manders grew up in the Trossachs. He’s seventeen now, and maybe still growing up, but in different places too. There’s always a notebook in his rucksack and sometimes when he is out he writes things down. Later, he calls them poems.