1997 

To Alexander Carmichael

Your books made me envious

as nothing else ever did,

for in them I glimpsed an enchanted world,

a people with a prayer for every act,

each with a role to play in an ordered mystery. 

     

I was jealous too of Heaney,

surrounded by tools of the land,

symbols of his people’s labour:

wood and iron, rope and leather

worn and frayed in the hope of repayment. 

     

Out I come from Safeway, and the cars are

packed with plunder from every continent;

despite all the ads, there isn’t enough here

to uplift the heart, and too much of it

is paid for in loneliness. 

     

I try and lure myself into believing

that your view of the age, Alastair,

was only as hallowed as your imagination,

and that no farmer would agree with Heaney

that his palms had been skinned raw by a symbol. 

     

But even in me there is a prayer to be found,

not for the cattle to yield their milk

as we have lakes of it,

not for smooring the telly,

or for the sharp tongue of the satirist, 

But for the grace and courage

to accept this age I live in,

since the fate of those people was no clearer,

amidst grime and sweat,

than my own fate amidst buying and selling. 

You gave us the prayer of ordinary things

which I hear now in the thrum of the wipers,

waiting at the lights, my life

fraying amidst joy and pain –

the fate of every single human before me. 

1997 

Letting Go of Dreams

The evening is calm,

in the sky through the window

not a blot …

Hush, my darling,

don’t speak just yet,

there are ghosts passing by. 

     

It is no one man I would mourn

but a lifetime of hunger,

every untaken choice that now slips away

because of you, fair man. 

     

Keep vigil with me

till they vanish from sight.

They will not come near us, for

mightier than they

is your seed in my womb, and fiercer

will be the cry of our first-born

when you hold him aloft. 

Ugh Briste
do Cholm, aig trì bliadhna a dh’aois

Sheas thu air ugh na Càisge

a bh’ agam bho aois m’ òige

’s tu dannsadh mun teine casrùisgte.

    

Smaoinich mi mar a chomharraicheadh na Sìnich

le duilleig de dh’òr

an sgoltadh ann an soitheach briste,

is iad a’ dèanamh toileachas às a bhreòiteachd,

às a chàradh eadar bith is neo-bhith …

ach ’s ann a bha an t-ugh na mhìle pìos.

    

Is ged nach robh càil de bhreòiteachd

anns an ràn a thàinig asad

’s tu bàthadh a’ chiùil

ris an robh thu a’ dannsadh,

no anns na deòir theth

bha a’ taomadh far do ghruaidhean,

chuirinn-sa òr air do phianadh aig an àm ud

’s tu ag aithneachadh nach buan a’ bhòidhchead.

2000

A Broken Egg
for Colm, at three years of age

You stood on the Easter egg

I’d had since childhood

as you danced barefoot round the fire.

    

I remembered that the Chinese would mark

with gold leaf

the crack in a broken vessel,

to celebrate its fragility,

its repair into being and non-being …

but the egg, it turned out, was in a thousand pieces.

    

And though there wasn’t a shred of fragility

in the howl you let out,

drowning out the music

you’d been dancing to,

or in the hot tears

teeming down your cheeks,

what I would gild was your pain at that moment

as you realised that beauty does not last.

2000

Walzer

I got my full money’s worth on the Walzer,

with that man giving the car a violent spin

every time it came to a rest,

and me lying back, thighs wide,

eyes shut, screaming,

rather as I lay back twenty years ago

pinned down by another man who couldn’t distinguish

the face of pain from the face of pleasure,

a man determined

I should get my full virginity’s worth

as he gave my body one more spin,

saying ‘You’ll thank me yet;

you’re better off without it.’

    

I actually thanked the man on the Walzer

as I stumbled off the machine,

just as I thanked that first man

as he handed me my bags at the station,

and I travelled north all day in a daze

knowing my father’s daughter was not returning unchanged.

Editor’s note: Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912), collector and original editor of the folklore material published as Carmina Gadelica – Hymns and Incantations.