Walking at Inverewe

Walking at Inverewe late afternoon in reluctant sunshine, we disturbed a large antlered red stag who melted away in silence. All about the beech trees were illuminated shades of gold and yet I had a shiver. It put me in mind of a long poem I wrote many moons ago about another time, another place. This is part of it...


Tasting the air, the painted stags read
the signs, gather their hinds
perhaps already ripe with seed.
The heather sings an ancient song
and where rocks crowd close
streams speak in familiar tongues.
The inn with ale and fiddle and good hearth,
welcomes no painted people, though red cheeked
and whisky-softened like fine leather.
And I a stranger in their midst – but not;
familiar with their unknown consonant-heavy
words, their music and the hardness
of their living, familiar with the unbreathed air
of glens, familiar the soft earth-taste
of water, air-borne mewing buzzard
and the lapwing’s call across the marshy waste


Long-gone, I may have never been before,
or may have mis-remembered times.
How then is this wild land my home
and how the people kin to one who kinless
walks alone, without a word of language.
And why the music in my bones,
why the very sight of weave and weft
of plaid should make me weep.
My different hardships don't compare;
no killings, wholesale slaughter, rape, no child
torn from my breast while innocent I sleep,
no ship to take me far from all I love and
cherish to a new and harder life
so sheep can take my place.



And last, my sense of roots so deep
so long and fathomless sunk well in velvet peat.
I feel I am a mighty tree whose being is assured
in history, so much I've witnessed, so many
gatherings I've blessed within my shade.
My roots spread far beneath the braes
beneath the oceans, minches, lochs
until they reach, connecting, every far-flung
kinsman speaking still the music of
their Kingdom of the Gaels.
And in my heart-wood hidden fast
are secrets more than you could know of
times just past, and times long gone so there
are simply shadows on the land as if in
one enormous swoop a people disappeared,
grasped by a single giant hand.



from 'Landseer Landscape'
copyright Sue, 2001