When the Moors Call Upon Your Name

They say time forgets what wind remembers,

but I knew you long before the stones were stacked,

before the clans drew lines in the heather,

before breath had a name.

You..

with hands calloused like the bark of rowan,

and eyes the green-gray of storm-fed tide,

walked out of the gorse and into my hunger.

No words. Just a look.

And the moor answered.

We met where peat bled secrets into the earth,

where foxglove drank from broken sky.

You stitched silence into my skin

like tartan wrapped 'round old wounds:

tight, warm, aching.

I was no maiden soft with lace,

but bone, blood, and bramble.

Grief etched on my lips like a Psalm unsung.

You kissed me anyway..

like I wasn’t a ghost of war,

but the war itself,

and you the soldier too tired to keep fighting.

There were no promises.

Just firelight

and the scent of pine resin on your beard,

and how my name

sounded less cursed in your mouth.

Seasons did what they always do:

they left.

You followed, or maybe I stayed.

But in the sleet of absence,

I wear your voice like a blade at my hip.

Still,

sometimes the crow caws at dusk

and I swear it’s you,

mocking the soft edge I’ve become.

Or the loch mirrors the sky just so

and I remember the way you wept

when I told you I had nothing left to give

except my ruin.

Yet you stayed that night,

in the ruin.

And made it a home

for one heartbeat longer.

If I walk the ridge now,

wind snapping at my skirts,

you might walk with me..

not in flesh,

but in every wild thing that refuses to be tamed.

This is what love in Scotland is:

raw as frostbit knuckles,

brutal as truth,

tender as moss

growing stubbornly on the gravestones of our past.

Time didn’t win.

We just became part of it.

And the moor still calls..

each time I breathe your name.