Day fourteen and for the first time, I'm posting a poem that's not technically new...  I know it's cheating but really haven't had time to write a poem today and it's one I wrote a couple of months ago and haven't used in a 'formal' sense yet.  Needs a lot of editing anyway!  Will make up for it by trying to write a 'good' poem tomorrow, feeling v guilty now...  Managed two weeks though :)

Homeland

Some say it’s in their genes,

alleles coded like a map.

Others swear by flashbulb memory,

geomagnetic homeland fields.

                                           Maybe.

It was my grandmother,

recently widowed though you’d never guess,

who wanted to watch the salmon leap.

I waited by the door as she folded

blue and pink dressing gowns,

shook the duvet across the double bed.

We took the high road,

stumbled over October-damp rocks -

Nanny in her quickstep heels;

I in my unremarkable wellies.

You’re so like your Gotchogo, she’d say,

so practical and such patience as I stared

through his blue eyes.

We stopped at his tree – rowan -

sapling potential burning gold

amid rotting leaves and moss.

I watched the Ben in the distance,

russet and pine against grey Scottish sky.

We walked on towards the burn,

rippling in the distance.

The glen thinned in shafts of shadow.

We waited for a flash of quicksilver.

The first thud of failed fish spun my head with nausea;

I watched them float, flow and sink.

Nothing prepares you for life’s futility,

shock paralyses the mind with guilt.

I don’t know if any made it upstream.

Time suspended in an endless cycle

as Nature dashed its infants against the rocks.

But time’s not a snapshot.

Even now, decades on, I can still hear

the constant rush of water.

The suicide-slap of salmon on rock.