James Aitchison has a close encounter of an avian kind in the Outer Hebrides. Happily, all ends well. Dr Aitchison was born in Stirlingshire and studied at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, gaining a doctorate on Edwin Muir at the latter. An Eric Gregory Award winner for poetry in 1968, he has published various collections over the past decades..

ON SOUTH UIST

In an instant

of split-second

time-lapse clarity

we saw it falling from the sky

a seeming-solid shawl of blue-grey cloud

the width of the windscreen

in the same instant

you braking

not veering

braking by reflex

faster than falling

faster too fast for fear

you and I bracing

brain-gut-and-heart

for the thud

and the smear

in the next in the same

in the next instant

the cloud retracting its legs

folding its sinuous neck.

~

And then the little thrill of deliverance:

the windscreen was intact, and on wingbeats

slower than the beating of my heart

the blue-grey bird flew into blue-grey cloud.