I wrote this poem while visiting Harris last year. On the island of Scalpay off the east coast of Harris there is a lighthouse called Eilean Glas. It is automated now but you can still see the abandoned house and outbuildings and imagine how it would have been when it was looked after by a proper lighthouse keeper. A plaque records that the first keeper lived there for thirty-five years. That was the starting point. The story is imagined!

The Keeper

People were surprised to hear he’d been there forty years,
and yet it had been easy.
Swept up by the daring of the impossible enterprise
he watched the tower rise, block by block,
an ungainly birth from the rocks
until, with sheets and scaffold swept away,
the clean new thing stood strong in its proper place,
tall as truth, steady as a lodestar,
its lines an affront to the chaos of tide race.
And the memory of how it was before,
the basalt reef churned and drenched
the waters heaving prussian blue and acid white,
still burned his mind.

And then the complex business of topping out
and the necessary equipment,
derrick, hawser, winch, windlass,
flares and mirrors, ladders, rails, pumps and cylinders,
and the conductor fixed at the highest point;
not to speak of all the domestic offices,
the scullery, stores, parlour, pantry
and the room set aside for sleep,
for a man must have all he needs to survive in such a place.
The woman too: spoons and firkins,
brooms and ladles and washboards,
skillets, kettles, curtains,
and the writing desk where she sat during her afternoons.
She lasted less than a year after the child was gone
for the comfort she needed
was beyond his power to give.

Later it became easier: the routine inspections,
the constant adjustments and minor improvements.
Periodic deliveries of supplies were an intrusion
for they distracted from his purpose.
And always the passing of gulls and the surge of swell:
neither days nor nights were ever still.
Shags and guillemots became his friends, and strangers
in passing ships watched for his light.

When after many years they sent him a letter
to tell him it was time for him to go
he placed it unopened on his table.
It lay like a carefully crafted sentence,
an inscription on an unloved grave.
Twice they had to come for him in the end,
the second time with dogs and axes,
taking him trussed but still crying out.
Now in the silence
he counts the lives he saved with his own.