It's Still Life

14 of 27: Driftspire – a Colour once felt, not seen—The Joy of Being Completely Unknown

16 July – Lindisfarne: Holy Island, Northumberland – low tide, salt breath, sheep for company

PART 1: (6 Sentences)
14 of 27 — Driftspire: The Joy of Being Completely Unknown

The North Sea sleeps at low tide, and Brigid walks the causeway’s glinting ribbon of bone-pale sand across the water; Lindisfarne rises like a waking head, its monastery ruins wind-etched — silence is anonymous here.

She takes off her boots and presses her bare feet into the wet sand, each step gritty, grounding …the island reads her like a palm.

The air smells of seaweed and stone — Brigid sits on a sun-warmed ruin and whispers, in a voice not entirely her own, “Do you remember the shape of prayer before it had words?”

The waves answer — soft, silvered — and for a moment, she becomes the question the island has been asking for a very long time … and a crow lands beside her, not on the ruin but on her shadow, tilting its head as if to say:

“You’ve walked this causeway before, Brigid of the Glyphs, Bríd na nGlithe — but never with your eyes open.”

She exhales, and the wind carries her breath into the monastery’s hollow rows and arches, where it twists into a sound she’s heard in dreams — a chorus of 27 voices humming the Driftspire hymn, the one she wrote when the world was younger, and her hands were ink.

PART 2: (6 Sentences)

14.1 of 27 — Driftspire: Hymn of the Unwritten
Lindisfarne: Just before dusk, ruin-breathed and tide-bound

The wind doesn’t ask—it unspools Brigid’s words like a psalter left in the rain, syllables bleeding into Driftspire hymn’s margin:

From the Hymn of the Unwritten

Unname me, o wind, and I will answer
Not as daughter, not as flame,
But as the hush between gull cries,
As the tide’s unfinished name,
For I was not carved; I was spilled
In breaths between unwritten verse,
And even if fog forgets my outline,
The stones will remember my stir.

Lindisfarne exhales its runes and glyphs, the sandy causeway rewriting itself around her footprints like a book erasing its prologue, and from the sea wall, a row of crows stares down, waiting for the wind’s next decision.

One crow lands on a ruin’s collapsed rib and drops a mussel shell at Brigid’s heel—inside, a scrap of vellum curls: You were never “spilled” — you were poured into the 28th cup (the one the Book hides in its spine).

She lifts the shell and, for three breaths, the fog swallows the monastery — the island becomes a hush, a gull’s cry, and it tastes of a word too old for language.

Brigid pockets the shell, and from behind her, softly, Felreil murmurs, “The island never forgets its own.”

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “ROW”.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.