where, frozen, found no longer
flowing in liquid life,
it lies rock-hard,
free once,
but now death bound.
The hill has become the year's tombstone
and on it bronze bracken
and russet marsh grass
write its epitaph.
AUTUMN DUSK
Half-sights and half-sounds,
slight smells - apples and damp ground,
leaves lapsing into rich humus;
interweaving counter-point of curlew calls,
owl deep-hollowing out of billowing trees;
bat-wings flailing ripe night air,
winnowing rich grain of insects;
robins halting-the-heart
stippling on hedge and bush
bright points of sound;
chestnut trees turning to golden fountains
and spiked green hail;
geans and rowans differently burning
to reds and glowing purple;
shapes of hills and great trees by-the-river
merging, water and land flowing
into darkness half-seen, half-heard
drawing and moulding me
to a new half-knowing.
NOVEMBER GALE
Go out into a gale-lashed day;
let the wind blow through your mind,
and toss your wild thoughts far away
over tumbling hills.
Take your ragged images that
whip-clap and clash,
caught in the branches of the trees wind-slashing
and let them there go flying free.
Let loose on seagull-wings your wishes
and the gale toss to sky-height
your dreams'
Where the high eagle threads
the eye of the needle of daylight.
And where the sun sheds sky-lark song,
silver, shimmering and bright.
Then let your mind descend,
wind-wide over the
opening landscape,
fresh with the wonder of
new sight.
WINTER ROBIN
Even the bird - song was brittle
in the frosty air,
a robin's singing found thin ice
over the wintered garden,
not claiming territory
but affirming it was alive,
would live,
its territory the warm mystery of life
impenetrable to the cold clarity
of frozen death.
Beyond the logical analyses of frost,
beyond the notes of song, plotted
on the computer-screen of a Winter sky,
the frail bird's life, flame frosted,
drove back December's harsh reductionism
FROST
Here on the hillside
the raiding clans of frost
retreat,
while on the flat strath
blue mist hangs about
the farms like smoke
from winter's icicles of fire.
But at the valley's end
broad mountains billow
in pink tinted clouds of snow
downing into soft legends
the cruel realities
of winter feuding.
MID-WINTER
Mid-winter comes -
driven on by packs of wind
rampaging in defenceless hills
where all the black-sheep pine trees
tightly penned, rush, heave in panic;
where the still pool
of hill lochs
beaten brown becomes sheep held,
swirling and leaping round
into a water of dark wool.
Mid-winter comes -
swept on by rivers,
building a muscled-mass from
sinew streams,
thrusting aside thin eyesight,
beating the solid piers
of the bridge into
fierce opposition,
until their counter-thrust
makes stone seem light
and it must skim the water and become
a Catamaran rushing upstream
and out of sight.
Mid-winter comes -
the moon's sharp sickle
scythes the short daylight down,
scattering stars
like grains of light,
spilled from its meagre harvest;
sprinkles the fields of sky ploughed
into darkness - soil of night -
fields yet more cold than dark,
more felt in the eyes
than simply now seen through them,
more shattered ice than bars
of cloud.
WINTER WINDS
The bitter winds that hold us prisoner
in our car, cannot deny us the freedom
of eyesight. From up here on the rising
edge of the Sidlaw Hills our gaze
wanders at will over the
brown-green quilted strath. Snow
dapples the tops of dark distant mountains
like foam cresting gigantic waves.
While nearer at hand tiny houses
huddle in small grey towns.
Look here! beside us, above the roadside verge
a fluttering kestrel hangs, wings
scarcely moving. It seems in this
storm-tossed sea of wind,
to inhabit some island of stillness
that moves untroubled with it,
or to sail a small boat that drifts
only to anchor again fast above
some tussock of quivering grass.
WINTER
Light, like thin cold soup, is
ladled out into the
beggar's bowl of the frosted valley,
while hills, permanent as the poor,
draw clouds in tatters
round stark limbs.
The misery of winter
digs deep into this place.
Brewing tea to bring cheer
to my shivering flesh
I look out of the kitchen window
and feel the garden's grim greyness
freeze my eyes;
when, suddenly - like laughter
in a prison camp -
a blackbird's song gospels the day.
Tentative, half-remembered phrases
question the finality of dawn's chill prophecy
of death.
The singing notes climb
numb-fingered up
sheer cliffs of frozen air,
reaching at last a peak,
a point of credal affirmation
of a baptismal winter-death
and spring rising.
WINTER DAWN
Briefly the Winter dawn glows
and dies down into dull grey.
Etched on the sky an urgent arrow
of geese divides the still, steely air.
Against the drooping belly of the clouds
the tall stark trees stretch out
dark veins, and now the wind
uncoils and whips away
all hope of warmth,
and certainty of life prolonged.
Coldness intense as hatred
repels the right to live.
How can the midget mouse
the miniature wren,
scuttling amongst the wreckage
of the hedge hope
to keep death at bay?
(“Yet Winter's hate must at last give way to Spring's life-giving love, and love lasts to eternity”. Anon - quoted by Sheila Cassidy in "Good Friday People")
CHILDREN SLEDGING
The sunshine of those dull days
was the laughter of children playing
in a world, snow covered, of white delight
transformed from green braes,
where slithered and sped bright
plastic sledges bundled with excitement.
And their laughter was a sparkling torrent
flowing freely in a world imprisoned in ice;
glittering and gleaming natural joy
unlocked an inner door,
stirred the dull adult mind
with a wonder that lightens our darkness
when a child plays.
THE KEILLS
(A rugged promontory in Knapdale, Argyll)
"As we die of a disease, so we live of love, hidden within us."
(La Soif - Gabriel Marcel)
Here, where I stand on the land's thrust of the Keills,
the rock-rent ground, the sea-thrashed shore about me,
the wind, thundering in my ears, hurtles from Jura,
across the battering Sound.
I look at Jura's mountains - massed menace wrenched from
patient miles of moorland;
everything about me is glory and torment,
its contradiction thrust through my being
with this wind's fierce, final questioning.
The rocks (not flat, slab-heavy masses) rise
round me, a thousand spires
pulling against their weight,
reminding me of the small chapel behind me -
stones, useless now, except for memory to penetrate
time, to recreate in thought a living community of worship,
a meeting of men,
there gathered to face full-force the wind out of
the contradiction of their own flesh and spirit,
on that stone slab where was concentred
all the encircling contradiction of this place.
What mad metaphysical system
bodied their belief?
What superstition-sodden faith
drenched their prayers?
What cruel charity
of righteousness and the damned
bent their self-will to care and respect
for each other?
No matter. They held out words
to give their being in return
for Being received.
There on the black menace of Jura
a light, a speck - no more - flickers
and stares, as clouds clear sun from water.
It is in me,
that light that flickers
and yet steadily stares in silence.
Wind out of contradiction cannot extinguish its glare.
For this small flickering light
stills the wind's thunder, melts mountains,
solidifies the sea
into peacefulness.
This light takes all gleams, glances, dances,
flickering and bright glories,
and binds them in me into
one beam of brightness.
This light unwinds the tangle of light and darkness,
the wavering warfare of joy and pain,
and says, "I stand, not I, but love stands in me.
All is love-living, whether unfolding in peace or
tortured by suffering.
Love in me is an openness, light-leaping
yet still,
joy-feeling, yet not holding.
Out of the contradiction of rock and sea,
flesh and spirit, suffering and celebration -
out of it all - light, love in me is
reflecting the Being of Light and Love
who made this place."
HILL-TOP
When man first separated himself from the animal
by the height of a hill,
pulled out of the gravitation of instinct,
and by his first flickering intelligence,
made the unwelcoming wind
his neighbour;
took rocks and built on the hill
his own hill
set higher still against
the cruel tongue of the gale -
scandalmongering, harsh tale-telling to the whole
open heavens his weak shivering nakedness -
shut up her mouth with
the ragged dyke of his first hill-dwelling;
then the amazement in the chill first morning sight
of his separateness of hill-height
echoed down his labyrinthine mind,
setting him level with the sun rising
equal,
as his mind dawned with re-echoing
life-and-death power to match
the sun's flower of flame.
And in its dying a wonder
projected him to the first space-exploration
of sight,
throwing his eye-open feeling
wildly reeling about the
shatter of scattered stars,
in awakening ecstasy, as he welcomed night by growing night
the still glowing glory of
pregnant moon,
who in time from her full womb
gave birth to his worship and dread delight.
Out of the animal jungle,
against the grain of himself,
he climbed,
to make rock and mind,
heaving giddy height and imagination
his element.
By these hills he raised himself
to stand above himself,
become more than he was,
set his mind madly mountaineering
on visions and dreams,
made this wild place
the discovery of a human wildness;
mountain-leaping, stretched out
wings of longing,
and became eagle minded,
soared and plunged,
loved and despaired as never
in the blind earth-bound jungle.
To-day I come to this place
of heaving, harsh, unsympathetic rock,
of tormenting rejection of wind,
to set the human jungle
of town-and-earth-bound people
at a distance -
to be a person,
to become in the wind's frantic action,
still -
to be, by the height of a hill,
myself,
separate, alone, human -
and, by the soaring sweep of sight, to
waken again the height and depth
of longing,
of love and despair, to dare
the eagle wings of
dread and delight.
THE BLESSING
Not the thrusting, eager cry of geese
striving to rise or arrowed
against the wind, but,
from behind the great pine tree,
a mellow, murmuring music of swans
flying in line, low,
wide-winged and slow, with
flowing, round sound,
calling, thirteen in number;
passing overhead, yet not passing
but blessing, and white-clad too
as the newly baptised, washed white
by the obedient blood of the man,
answering love's invitation
to death. All this at that point
where the ground-bound desolation
of prayer, sharing the will-bending
weight of others' pain and frustration,
and the impossible burden
of uncertainty; at that point,
when at last prayer too rose
in flight, winged with the spirit,
uplifted by the crucified affirmation,
there the swans flew straight,
like a saint's will joyfully
answering God's call;
and my heart was touched by
the feather floating breath
of blessing, from thirteen white swans,
answering God's call.
SELF – QUESTIONING
Why are you always mourning?
Tears again at the touch of a word,
A phrase, sight or sound.
What have you lost?
Is it forever the dead mother
Departing into the relentless assimilation
Of the cold, pitiless ground?
Loss it is; the impossibility
Of recovering prisoners time has taken.
But it is more - the sense of the possibility
Of discovery, gaining more ground,
If we could only risk the wave's torment,
The fathomless deeps,
Travel out from the shore.
OLD AGE
“Christ turns all our sunsets into dawns”
(Clement of Alexandria - 2nd Century)
This they call 'The evening of life'
implying there a mellowing,
a sheltering, a relieving from the
knife-thrust of competitive self-fulfilment,
which is known as 'Getting On In The World'.
Do they forget that evening is bright
with burnishing clouds into gold,
sword-thrust of dazzling beams of light
sun-setting, glorious glowing red sky
fulfilled, and that life, like light, may seem to die,
but rises always beyond sight's limited horizon?
THE FORCE WITHIN
There is a wildness in my mind, confined
behind the bars of rigid duty which define
the practical precincts of each day. Only the wind
is free to come and go where he must live,
and stars shed silver sparkling tears
into the deep pools of his eyes
where, as he lies,
he looks with longing
at the freedom of the skies.
From time to time his restless tread
thuds like a heart-beat in my head;
his shadow ripples over the bars,
and sighs like birds fly to the stars.
Sometimes I wonder if he is there.
Then, with the breeze, his nostrils stir
and waking, he leaps against his cage
until the wildness of my rage
surprises me.
Or, when the sun draws ecstasy of life around,
a sudden longing for the hills
startles me, stretching against the iron bound
necessity of duty.
I lie awake at night and ask myself
if I took strength, crumbled the bars, let him go free
would he, insane with lust,
imprison himself in my destruction or
would he, with a wild leap of love,
take me his prey -
and set me free?
RUBERSLAW
Centuries of experience have wrinkled
your rock-skulled face.
A dignity lies deep in your
millennial age and,
in the slowness of your year's change,
a gradual grace.
The growing tree is, to you,
a leap of life,
over as quickly as foot returns
to the ground.
Flowers flicker a moment,
smile at the corner of your mouth.
Yet everything about you possesses its
own unborrowed place.
Slowly you gather all growing and dying
to your decay
as time, which you seem to hold timeless,
must have its way,
and you too pass as the swift shadow-clouds