January, 5 Off Lindisfarne the waves shiver like monks at their ablutions. Under high horizontals of ice-cloud, the sky scrubbed clean as a dairy. The train darts north, hungry as a tongue. Only the exile longs for the words to name a country: either live it or learn, at a bare table, ancestral silence, like a rumble deep in the loch’s throat, the forgotten song of the curling-stone, the snow slipping like white meat from the bones of the mountain. - Alison Fell (Scottish poet, b. 1944)
