Forgive me if I seemed brusque at the airport,

these churches to farewell

are not where I choose to worship

and saying goodbye is like sheathing a sword,

the danger is not over until it’s out of sight.


You’re an introspective man, covert with your passion,

but I suspect you were as glad to see us

as we were to see you.

It’s been said that you are a perfect foil

to my extroversion,

we are a sort of Laurel and Hardy of the emotional spectrum.


One of the perils of transience

is the absence of solid friendship

so that we sometimes become

like wings without a body.

Having a friend arrive on our doorstep

is to find something we did not realise

we had lost.


A holidaymaker is as bright in the workaday world

as a mint coin on sunlit concrete

so that our biggest concern

was to polish your days

to the consistency of your previous excitement.

We are rusty entertainers at best.


One of life’s more pleasant surprises

is that we never know how or where

we will forge a friendship.

Friendships forged in the workplace

can be the most enduring

because there is no mandate to like our workmates.


For a few, too short days

you brought back for me all that was good

about my life in Auckland

and I can ask a friend for no greater gift

than to reflect a little sunlight.

Here, the Orkney Islands are wracked by unstoppable winds
like all small archipelagos, at the mercy of great sea distances
unbroken natural forces vast in their cumulative strengths.
But that is the holidaymaker, tourist, toe in the water folk
who come and go, come and go, to experience and send home postcards
bemoaning the wind , if only they knew the Islands true heart
like us resident Orcadians, new, and old, they would forget the wind as the wind often will not blow, and stay until their bones are buried with the forgetting of the outside World.