Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

“My beauty of Orkney mainland, a creature with a benevolent smile, a character clocked in duty, with features for a poet’s muse. She does not know, but hum, what if she did! “

They might not see how I feel the light of the setting sun of evening blankets around the familiars in Orkney and beyond, golden and bronze as if the light has become reluctant to leave their side.

They do not know that it is by their gaze I have seen myself anew, not through the glass of memory, nor the teaching of the hermit in solitude.

But someone who was not worn, nor wondering, nor the lost vagabond I have been, nor the sum of my sorrow or toil, but something, where a fire still burns beneath the ash.

For in their eyes, I am not lost, how strange to stand before another’s light and find my own reflection there, fierce with curiosity.
To know where they see warmth, there must be warmth.
Where they see grace, there must be grace.

They do not know how they wake the world in me, and if I only had known before what a mercy it is, to be seen, not as a shadow, empty shell of what was.

But as the possibility of what still may be, and for the briefest moment, I am glad to be alive, for now the air is different and the daylight becomes poetry again.

©️Elke T.B. Stevens 28/03/2025