The Guga Stone - Study for Encounter With A Soay Ram
ENCOUNTER WITH A SOAY RAM
He makes even you seem slight and superficial.
I love the way his deep
brown eyes always follow as we scale the steep
slope of the hill,
ensuring that we keep a careful distance
with dip of head and stamp of foot,
making it all too obvious it did not suit
him for us to shift closer with that imperious stance
with he ruled the limits of this island.
Yet there is more to it than this.
I witnessed, too, the vigorous
way he bucked and thrusted; no man
could keep that up so long, so strong.
Clearly top of the tups, he combined that stamina with a gaze
that encompassed life’s experiences. He’d known days
before you or I, our forebears, had belonged
to this world. That knowledge whirled
around his head, as if it were contained
in his great horns; each aeon of this planet’s life engrained
and scored within its semi-circles, whorls ….
Sorry. I know rejection’s hard but, comparing him to you,
I’d like to be one of his flock, his fondest and most faithful ewe …
