Eliza Traill
All her names
The hare.
A long way from blue.
What is the third thing?
Twelve snow buntings in a shadow house.
What she sees
A large stone lintel.
A hollow enclosed in a curved wall.
Small white bones.
A now completed circle.
The Charms She Binds
An arrowhead worked into a silver amulet.
Stone axes to protect the house from lightning.
A plaited coir shoe, buried under the fireplace.
What she has wrought
Many antler tines,
cut then hollowed,
whittled to the point.
By the balancing of her body
She offers her person
to the power of the wind.
Lydia Harris has made her home in Westray, one of Orkney’s north isles. In 2017 she held a Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award. Her most recent pamphlet, Painting the Stones Back, was published by Maria Isakova Bennet of Coast to Coast to Coast, in 2019.