September's Spotlight fell on Bob Horne.
'Bob Horne has an MA in Poetry from Huddersfield University. He has been writing poems seriously for a couple of years and has a collection, Knowing My Place, coming out in 2016. He helps to organise Puzzle Hall Poets in Sowerby Bridge and regularly attends sessions of the Albert Poets in Huddersfield and Gaia Holmes's Igniting the Spark workshops at Dean Clough in Halifax. He has also started a small publishing concern, Calder Valley Poetry. Its first pamphlet is currently in preparation.
Bob has played in a rugby team
which beat Wasps, hooked a West Indian fast bowler for six, and finished
ahead of an Olympic gold medallist in a World Championship race.'
White-Tailed Eagle
I cross the trackless Parph.
Behind me indifferent Atlantic waves
break along the length of Sandwood Bay,
with its red-haired mermaid,
its bearded sailor still knocking at night
on the windows of the broken bothy.
Beneath the dunes, shepherds say,
wrecks of longship and galleon
have been smothered for centuries.
Massive tussocks make for hard going.
I rest on my stick, face north
towards the oldest rocks there are
then nothing but cold seas
to the Pole and beyond.
Like a sheet of white shadow
close enough to disconcert
it climbs from the cottongrass,
iolaire sùil na grèine -
eagle of the sunlit eye -
smoulders for a moment,
still as a Stone Age carving,
until it rises, in its own time,
above this wilderness, the bay, the ocean,
leaves me at best
a fleck of a far-off star
whose gleam may never reach
this earth.
© Bob Horne
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