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THE COMFORTABLE WORDS
They
had been half-expecting it: this was where
messages from Hirta used to wash ashore
and a dead seal had been tangled in the strandline
the week before. Two boys were sent for a pony.
The old men lifted it between them, agreeing
arrangements they’d foreseen. The women
did what they could with the bruised and bloated body.
A suit was found. Those years there was no shortage
of timber. The men were of a mind: started
a new row behind their own lost sons,
and in their funereal best and their own language
laid the body into soft and sandy loam behind the wall.
They had been right: six days later, added another
to that row. Sent an order for stones
to tell what they knew: a Merchant Seaman,
a burial date. And an anchor, like the island sons.
The
women, gathered for tea when the men returned
even though there’d be no stories, just speculation
about tidal streams and distances, were perplexed
as to how a heart that had heard down with all hands
might be eased. They comforted themselves
with perhaps
and possibility though it would be fifty
years
before the word perhaps would be repeated aloud
by an out-of-season tourist, who stopped on the empty road
for the rare pleasure of lapwings hurtling
above stooked oats and, breathing the cold clear air,
was drawn through the iron gate in the wall,
to feel an ease, almost like belonging, as she walked
on the damp, clipped grass between the rows,
fingered the dates on the well-tended stones
and wondered about the men and women who’d served
a stranger as parent, lover, child.
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