He was a cook, the one
who murdered Erlend’s son. A man
with hands more used to kneading dough
than to the butcher’s blood-letting.

We’d toasted that name when times were fat:
seas teeming silver, wheatfields
thick and white with harvest. Children,
apple-red, thronging like oystercatchers.

But the law of the season’s turn
is deep ingrained. When bellies are full
it’s easy
to forget the winter to come.

They carried Magnus here
on a ship with black sails
while we bowed our heads, stared
at the ground, anywhere but at each other;

then laid our tributes
in stone at his feet:
fisherman, shepherd, skald.
Pieces of the island to casket his bones.

Now down the thin years, he whispers to us.
We fold newspapers, lower our tankards,
listen for the piping
of the curlew on the high green moor.