Letters drifting into the Unkown

On the island of St Kilda, beyond the Outer Hebrides, a few hundred people lived cut off from the world until 1930. Some cliffs that plunged into the sea, grass gripping on to the slope — this was their entire world. They had once come to St Kilda aboard boats, some two thousand years ago, but the boats were not left and the art of building new ones had disappeared together with the trees.

The Islanders survived by crawling on the rocks, collecting the eggs of the great auks. They wrote letters and threw them into the waves, something they had learned from a group of stranded soldiers who wrote a message on a lifebuoy and were thus rescued from the island. The letters drifted ashore in Scotland and Norway, but nobody came for the Islanders. What did they say?

Their houses are deserted, waves brake unheard against stone. The dreams that exploded in their synapses have become earth and been flushed out to sea. Like them, I have no idea who I’m talking to.

Photo by Michael. It shows the wrong island. Just because I can.