Postscript: at the ruins of St Mary on the Rocks, St Andrews

From Caledonian Postcards

Was it just legal fiction brought us here?
The battery
Is silent on the question, gone cold for fear
They’d wake the dead. They won’t but you know me—
A “ruin bibber,” unreformed, Romantic.
The morning’s clear, if cold. I sit in choir,
Intone a requiem in foreign diction.
Communed with gulls, asperged by the Atlantic,
Would that I sang with Pentecostal fire.
My teeth are flint and steel. My breath is friction.