Long listed for the WRITE ABOUT WALKING AND LISTENING competition run in July & August 2021
To begin and return over the threshold of the front door.
Placed in a spatial and temporal bardo, the daily loop-walk unspools. An opening into footfall recovered locality. No map, no compass, required.
On the shoreline, listening in to the language of tides: lip-lap-lip, cadences of ebb and flow, wind on water variations. Underfoot, the crunch of tidewrack — a line not made by walking.
The audible is not always visible. At times you can hear salt in the air.
Burnt-orange lichen choruses sing in circles on rock armour.
At the tip of the Ballast Bank, watching the weather arrive like a slab anvil dropping on the Forth. Pebbledash of percussive rain. In days of bright sunshine and languid air, the estuary as glass, when all collapses into a miscible surface of sea and sky.
Occasionally, eerie tendrils of Nessun Dorma drift up the river from a cruise ship, squatting in Rosyth Dockyard since lockdown. A haunting ode to absent passengers, as if to reaffirm existence in stasis, and a time to come again.
A heron descends, barely moving air, pausing time, intent on seeking the littoral margin.
Low tide at the harbour, where runnel streams weave desire lines through silt. Songs of seasonal geese-speech, gulls, curlews, and terns. The bardic yells of rooks rummaging the shingle —crow knows.
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The loop is tied. Scrunch of footfall on the gravel path, an avian pipe organ of wheezing wood pigeons on the roof.
The creaking door.
Over the threshold — once again.
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Read more from the Long List of stories submitted to the WRITE ABOUT WALKING & LISTENING competition. Listen to winning authors read their work at a showcase event on Sunday 26 September 2021 book here.
Buy WALKING – the 2021 limited edition illustrated chapbook anthology of 15 poems and stories inspired by walking and listening €4.50 + p&p
All proceeds go to support future Sound Walk Septembers
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