That was the evening they lit the bonfire
in the indigo light of a darkening summer day.
As we watched the small boy
with his father, gathering brushwood,
we assumed they would build
a barbecue oven among the
pebbles of the loch shore. But no!
After a granddad emerged with a box of matches
we saw there was nothing useful about this blaze,
those uncurling flames, which licked the greying sky, hungry to eat the last morsel of day,
dancing like pagans in a barbaric ecstasy,
chatting in crackling glee with each
fresh offering of straw or brushwood.
And then an audience started down,
one by one the mother, grannies, aunts
and uncles, cousins, friends. Nothing had been
cooked for them, no reward expected
except the passionate, praising flames
drawing them from their tents and caravans.
They stayed in silence till the burning turned to smoke,
sighing in grey-white coils to the evening air,
and the men kicked the last of the red-hot fragments
into the cool pebbles. Their faces shone.
For ten minutes, life had been transfigured.
And then they began to laugh
as, arm in arm, they walked back up the beach
a laughter of release the gods appeased.
� Sylvia Read Iona 1999
Lochaline Beach Campsite
Sylvia Read