Anam Cara

OUTSIDE A COTTAGE

They allow themselves to be strangers.

Here is somewhere else for them;

They hunt for images to take back

To perfectly ordered cupboards

In Germany or the States,

Proud to have captured

Something authentic of the place.

When the bus drops them,

The cameras come out

To snap the cottage ruin,

Rimmed against the black desert

Of bog and overgrown mountains

With the bones out through them.

They shoot the ruin, not sensing

How the image is a relic,

Imprinted with the presence

Of the ones who laboured here,

The stones warm with breath,

From the time a tourist was a wonder.

Will these ever know how it was,

To live here and know nowhere else,

To wake up inside this house once,

And come out at dawn to discover

Gifts left at the door in the night,

A shivering lake between flowering granite

And this line of new, blue mountains?