2013 in photos: British Isles

On an island, I looked for other islands:
smaller, emptier, round as up-turned

coracles barnacled to the shore.
I watched yachts catch the only sunlight

and thought of prized, greenstone axeheads
sunk in ceremonial lakes.

Smaller and smaller my longing grew
until it could almost fit in a watery pocket.

And yet these islands could not be kept:
they were Holy Islands, they were bird islands,

they were columns of cooled magma,
they were the skulls of ancestors

who had been killed three times—
once each for sky, land and water.

Here are their collars of bog iron,
their round houses roofed with turf.

This is a country almost without stoplights.
At each intersection, a traffic island

that can only be circled in one direction
like the stars wheeling about Polaris.

Riding across the Salisbury Plain, I soon got lost.
Millennia from now, archaeologists will say

How hungry for a glimpse of other worlds
these islanders must’ve been!