Lines on a Caithness beach

after Sonnet LXVI by Pablo Neruda

by Cáit O'Neill McCullagh

Hey Pablo! ¿Did nobody tell you?
Someone has carved your lines
in Sannick. Lithic lyric in rotten rock. 
In stone that curtains this county. Si, 
escrito en español. But (in a language 
I don’t want for your mouth; for North) 
they might say this, that 'a soul; a man, 
all fleero-wrapped, is falling— 
into a sewer'. 

                     The sea, Pablo. It makes
one streekit archipelago of us all. Wane 
& flow. Your words; this moon: Janus—
one face alone turned to the daysky. A blear-
print on flaxflower blue. Yet … she cannot
be uninscribed. Water will not wash from us 
what was wrought in fire & blood. O m’eudail, 

did you imagine yourself another Keats? Ebbed-up 
in love & once, at Cromarty; before the sea bore 
him home (only to ringlet him in dulse, in Rome).
Scrieve new sonnets. Streak the flanks of Wick’s
Trinkie quines, salmon-blushed, with tinta-de-
calamar. Let La Luna be soft light upon you.  

In 2013, the BBC reported that a line-and-a-half of Pablo Neruda’s 
poetry had been carved into the Old Red Sandstone at Sannick Beach. 
It reads 'Cae el alma del hombre al pudridero/con su envoltura frágil'.