It’s my favourite field, this one above the village, hare-run, rutted with frost and, on the top of the rise, the gean tree, angelic, near enough, in its primacy. Corbies lift from the cold ground at the heel of the day, a choir of rasps in the still air.
I’m listening to Public Service Broadcasting, that album about Amelia Earhart, her distant voice in my ears whispering about flight and the beauty of movement and the lonely quiet of a sunrise above the desert.
To the south, in the half-mist of the Fintry Hills, the tip of a turbine blade swings over and up in the lazy breeze.
Hiya!
Hiya!
Hiya!
Cheery, undeterred things they are, spinning beyond the top of the fells there. They don’t miss a chance to wave to me, these monuments to engineering – twirling solid, twirling fluid in the skoosh of wind.
Hiya!
Hiya!
Hiya!
I wave back, the way I still do to trains and the way I do to the geese who fight the corbies for the slim winter pickings. Amelia punches her words now to the punches of the beat. She tells me of danger, the press of propellor blade on air, the plane spinning into the dark night, the risks of doing nothing in the face of all things being possible.
Charlie Gracie
Charlie Gracie grew up in Baillieston, Glasgow and now lives in Thornhill, north of Stirling. His latest collection of poetry and short prose, Belfast to Baillieston, was published by Red Squirrel Press, who will publish his forthcoming pamphlet, a collaboration with Mairi Murphy and Donal McLaughlin.