Caithness CWS - Community - Arts - Scotia Review Poetry

Tanera The sea between held me, taking the land out of my reach like stacks in a book-shop. I longed for islands. They drew foot and hand. At the Badentarbat shore I was stopped sharply as if my foot had missed a plank, the step long gone. Over these Bering Straits habitation there still stared blankly back to this side from an isolated state of imagination. The day we crossed was thick rain that made solid green shadows in the houses. Where a roof was lost great nettles grew like thickets of small trees on untrodden floors, as if we slashed forest around the lost shores of Tenochtitlan.	The Last Feature (Achiltibuie 1961) I know now that I was a latecomer catching the last minutes of the picture I came in as Gaelic went electric, and the lights went on for Christendom the Empire and our last hardy remnants of native peasantry. Mt first year here was when fields still filled up with neat stooks, to stand like pooks in African hair, and shearing gathered together a thousand sheep and the talk in Gaelic from older men just over my age then, still in their strength. Now they and their speech have entered death’s sleep and their land has become indifferent, fading as pictures fade after the end.
Ancestors House upon empty house, the sky was notched with options. We made one of them our lair alongside those who were no longer there, entering silence through a door unlatched always, into a walled garden of thought readily grave and open to the dead. They, we knew, were in corners and would wait like uneasy tenants while we three played. They waited in the lum. We often looked through its dark funnel, for the sky up there was unearthly. You knelt with an eye cocked up that telescope, as if you could stare from here to the blue earth seen from the moon, as if space had moved over, made us room.	Roads Into Coigach The road would waken you in the morning with a left turn, a sharp move to the West. I still know this inner road, the inner warning of a boy of seven on holiday who lusts for the road’s ending, counting through the lochs, the mountains, remembering under the wheels the exact contours of small bony hills bouncing the road there like a long black cloth, until the final count – Badentarbat, Badenscallie, the turn down to Culnacraig and you were there. I have been told since that things have changed. Though the way-back I could take passed the road-end, back to sleep and parted the clouds high over Coigach like a flag.
Clepington Road (for Annie Mackay, died 1997) Theat house, steady as a clock’s decorum, With the clock’s round echoing on the round Of every quarter hour, for me still sounds Out sound order, steadiness: the front room’s Baffled sun sinking westward over books As the hearth fire rose, and tiled kitchen, Its tins in tiers. they kept place, books and tins, For years or grew gently, stratified rocks. Time in that house was by time defeated Denied disorder by a steady pulse, So that my sins were remitted by the house. Its gilded haze rubbed off, I repeated Like a child in heaven’s endless palace Undated hours, its habit’s beaten trace.