Lighthouse Gods.

When the lighthouse keepers left

they kept a light on for the gods

of such places.

Beacons of the Northern Lighhouse Board,

tabarnacles of Trinity House where the 

deep sea comes to worship.

On the outcrops, skerries, reefs,

chapels of ocean shelves uninhabited,

things come to pray,

all the places deemed uncanny,

haunted by something ten generations

of keepers could not say.

Baa Taing, Flannan, Black Nore,

more there than meets the eye.

So today the spray lashed towers

are tenanted by deities

(the ocean fills a vacuum)

than no man prays to. 

The Lighthouse Stevensons built beacons

but also altars in the deep,

tabarnacles to the gales

for things that knew no light,

whose sonorous voices sounded

more deeply than the foghorns

in the storm.

What moved in to Bunessan, Carraig Fhada,

Crow Point, spirits of the spray

that make even the deities of night

shrink with fear.

Around the coast where no-one goes

are the homes that hold the lighthouse gods,

Knuckle Point, Dungeness, Erraid Shore.