Guga

 

 

To prepare the delicacy

take one stone, granite or gneiss,

place in the pot with the guga,

boil for twenty minutes,

drain the fat and repeat four times.

Add an onion at the fifth boiling.

When the stone softens

the guga is ready to eat.

 

The guga flesh is fishy duck.

The odour, one could not call it aroma,

is a thousand years of hunting,

a childhood of celebrating

the coastal pabulum.

A cull of chicks, once blue eggs

on Sula Sgeir’s razor cliffs

forty miles from human habitation.

 

Ten men of Ness, foolish or brave

or both, set sail for the nowhere rock.

A tiny bothy is the only shelter,

the monastery derelict, the isle barren

ten months of the year.

Seasick arrival, relief at the landfall

despite the foul stench of gannet guano.

They bring poles, ropes, food and barrels.

 

​The rocks are slick with gizzard,

neck-cracked guga are plucked,

piled in circles of curing salt;

grey carcases like cairns.

The two week ritual leaves no calluses,

but ripped fingers cruciate in brine.

Oilskins offer little warmth

for the bones of Nessmen.

 

Some sense of perpetuation,

crafts sodality elsewhere abandons,

drives the inexplicable call;

the instinct to return each year

to chance the precipitous cliffs,

proof of life by risking it;

testing brawn, tenacity and species;

a delicacy of survival.