where the horizon turns earth to heaven

I'm visiting the Scottish Poetry Library for an event during this coming week; and have thus recently been drawn to the pictured 2008 Collection, by Tessa Ransford, the 'founder/director' of the Library ...

... here's a favourite verse from within:


Gravity and Grace
Arctic Terns at Balnakil

Arctic rhapsodist from Celestial North
or stellar emanation at speed of light
a dancing wheel around Polaris
Dubhe, Arcturus, the great, the dark one

Flier in diagonal cruciform
on angled tapering wing with festooning plumes
indented tail your daring signal
mackerel clouds as your chariot-bearers

Come wind come storm come darkness come Great White Bear
our navigation sure, our direction set
from Callanish the pillars point us
upward and northward beyond our knowledge

And every step we tread on our stony ground
reveals the elemental, the fiery pull
from airy sky to water-lilies
arc of your flight to translucent petal

Black your diving head into white sea spray
with blood-red beak as you rise and soar away
like Orphic music you transpose us
where the horizon turns earth to heaven

---

Tessa Ransford (1938 - 2015)

---