Weekend Three - Moniack Mhor

The hill is alive with ... the Highland Literary Salon Writing Retreat. Seventeen keen writers, woolied and wellied, have arrived, and the place is bulging with words, with Alan Bissett as their intrepid leader.

Saturday evening we sat about the fire in the main house and people read some of the things they'd been writing. It was wonderful - all the different voices and styles, all the tantalising snippets of story - and when I went back through the wind to the cottage (many hours before many of them!) I saw the moon. It was amazingly bright, being at its closest point to Earth that night, so I wrote a poem for the weekend, called ...

Don’t Disappoint the Moon

On the night of Saturday 19 March the full moon was at its closest point to Earth. Observers noticed that it shone over Moniack Mhor with a particular intensity.

Astonished, it hangs,
the white, bright face inn the sky,
city-sized eyes agog.
Lunar ears, hard
to distinguish from any other crater,
are wide for words.
The old man's mouth drops open,
a trickle of moon dust
unnoticed at the edge.
But time is implacable.
The face sails on,
looking, longingly,
over a shoulder it does not possess,
whispering across the blank of space
"But wait - no - you can't stop there -
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?!"