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Generations
Reflection,
A point of light
Flaring;
Metal edge
Under vegetation
In the heather slopes.
‘…clear in the mystery of the hills…’
Scurrying wind
Lifts bracken, its tips’ dance
Morses signal from shadow;
Broken cloud’s
Illuminated moments pass
The scarred scree-slopes,
Glinted messages
From below the tree-line.
No letters, numbers, no name,
No word even spoken
In the sunlight sending.
So distant light
Meets the eye
Through the intermediate:
Prism, fragment, quartz-grain:
Sun and retina
With understanding fumbling
Between.
‘…a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan…’
Not so far removed
The indecipherable message,
The eyes to decode it,
The brittle mineral thing
Scattering meaning across the wind
If meaning ever came
In the greater light
So shuttered there.
‘The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West…’
Now place
Has both form and meaning.
If, among stones
And stones’ vegetation
Some remnant is quickly lit
A piece of another life
A revived and fleeting memory
Caught like a ghost in sun.
‘…to the Sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.’
Walls rebuild themselves
Scattered deer on the slope
Turn to people
Figures in a dance
Around homes remade
Figures who gather herd and harvest
Cut turf and rig,
Shapes on the high pastures
Where only yellow stems
Shiver now.
‘The men lying on the green
at the end of every house that was,
the girls a wood of birches,
straight their backs, bent their heads.’
Past lives remain
Incised on the land
And come to life again
In the random chance
Of ruin and relic
Touched by moving light.
‘…the dead have been seen alive.’
In the same flash
Our present lives
Come and go
The same echo
A shuddered energy
Making and unmaking us.
Only the span of it
Appears to differ.
Long as it is,
The way light travels
Reflected, refracted, dispelled,
Is, step by step, one step
Among so many.
The eye itself
Is as momentary
As the seeing.
A long cycle
Of dust returning to dust
In which hesitant memory,
The flickering of time,
Is remembered.
Of such grit
Is every generation made.
form
the seeds owhich replace tomorrow
Italicised - extracts
from Somhairle MacLean's Hallaig.
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