In Scotland Time and Space Collapses


We stood above carved stone
spelling ancestral names buried
a good two centuries,
gazed through mist to island and sea and island,
roofless walls and fences,
rock, organic as a love affair
fingered piece by bloody piece
into place by fingers whose blood
might now burn and sing
in our veins.

Sensed the resonance of pain,
futile hopelessness of clearances
that lingered, and visceral connections
that leapt generations
flitting foolish
just above this—our single earth.

Drank water cold and clear and overabundant
from a pewter cuach, symbolic and marked
with Ulva rock.

Thanked all the old Gods
that when they had to go
these people, becoming us,
found their way to a country so
big, so open, and
so dry.

We are because they were,
we live because they died,
and we thrive because they would not
lay down—they gathered and went
…somewhere.

We called there,
(at deepest midnight),
our home bound children had finished breakfast,
already they were spinning off into their own
new dawns.