You asked me for a poem for yourself, thinking, I suppose, that I would put you among the stars for beauty and intelligence.
But as for me I grew up in bare Lewis without tree or branch and for that reason my mind is harder than the foolish babble of the heavens, and also at Hiroshima the kettle boiled over our music and in Belsen there was seen an example of dishonour eating love and flesh, and because of that and because of the truth and all the Evil that was done to us, and we ourselves did (among our complaints) I will never put a pen again into my fist for beauty or for intellect. Beauty is dangerous enough and as for the mind did it not spoil the glittering cities of Europe?
When she took the great sea on her, Lewis went away and will not return. I was not compelled to sail ‘over to Australia’ but around me is Hiroshima and Pasternak’s book is in my hands –
I will not drink a health-giving drink from the spring of the healthy deer of May but from water full of eels which are electric and shivering on my flesh like Venus breaking through the mind and the dark-green of the clouds but it was the fine bareness of Lewis that made the work of my mind like a loom full of the music of the miracles and greatness of our time.
I saw myself in a camp among the Nazis and the wretched Jews. My hand was white with the innocent lamps of Guernica and my cheeks streaming with piteous tears but in one hand there was a hard gun while the gas was writhing like the mist of Lewis over cold rocks.
Standing at the edge of the reservoir that was dumb, menacing, with bare water, I saw the live flies hitting the dead flies on the back. The foxglove was heavy about us with summer’s perfume and the sky as limpid as the music of a fiddle. In that moment you leaped and went down into the water, and I was frightened that you wouldn’t rise and I shouted in spite of the skill of my intelligence but after that I became silent.
I will not climb these mountains for what is at the top?
The stars are holding a ceilidh but what can they say that is not in my own dark depth? I will never sail on a ship. My Pacific is in my head and my Columbus praising countries that are far below. The day of my mind is my May and my twittering of birds the quick thoughts that are black and yellow about my skies.
I will never go to France, my dear, my dear, though you are young. I am tied to the Highlands. That is where I learnt my wound.
And are we not tied to that as well? A door will open but where will the slavish spirit of man go? I heard the wind blowing to the Greeks at the Pillars of Hercules: our round world is more harmonious than that. O, it is not a word of manliness that I am speaking of but about the guilt that follows me from mountain and moor. My Uist is inside my head and my love like an agonising tether that is yellow and dangerous and beautiful.
‘Go to London,’ they said to me. ‘In the great city you will compose music from the bitter hard light of your stomach.’ And I was struggling with myself for many years, thinking of those streets, men with penetrating power in their faces, an illuminated glittering taxi flashing on the windows of my intelligence.
But tonight sitting at the fire and the hills between me and the sky and listening to the empty quietness and seeing the deer coming to my call I think of another one who said the truthful words: ‘Look straight down through wood and wood. Look in your own heart and write.’
Will you go with me, young maiden, over to Japan where our sanity is wasting in that big bomb that fell on town and on mountain?
Not to Uist among the trees or to green Lewis among the heather nor a Farewell to Finnary burning calmly in the strait nor in the hall of Glasgow or Edinburgh and Duncan Ban walking elegantly with a bright gun among the lies that are clouds round our time.