You are the century’s logger and reiver
balanced between English and Gaelic,
a frontiersman with each foot on a log
rolling inexorably down the Mackenzie.
Sometimes your speech is schizoid
but sometimes it is subtle, right
and winding, as when John Munro wrote
about mob-caps of snow on the mountains
of Assynt in the mid-1910s,
in Gaelic, the English unsaid.
But like a horse slick-stepped yet slipshod
in two styles you stumble and falter
unless – no turning back – you go further,
add cant to parole to langue,
and skipping from word to word, log to log
roll your unbearable haul up the river.