James Aitchison has a close encounter of an avian kind in the Outer Hebrides. Happily, all ends well. Dr Aitchison was born in Stirlingshire and studied at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, gaining a doctorate on Edwin Muir at the latter. An Eric Gregory Award winner for poetry in 1968, he has published various collections over the past decades..
ON SOUTH UIST
In an instant
of split-second
time-lapse clarity
we saw it falling from the sky
a seeming-solid shawl of blue-grey cloud
the width of the windscreen
in the same instant
you braking
not veering
braking by reflex
faster than falling
faster too fast for fear
you and I bracing
brain-gut-and-heart
for the thud
and the smear
in the next in the same
in the next instant
the cloud retracting its legs
folding its sinuous neck.
~
And then the little thrill of deliverance:
the windscreen was intact, and on wingbeats
slower than the beating of my heart
the blue-grey bird flew into blue-grey cloud.
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