by Paul Keegan
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.
And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrées.
GEOFFREY HILL Ovid in The Third Reich1968
non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
solaque famosam culpa professa facit.
(AMORES, III, XIV)
I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.
I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.
GEOFFREY HILL September Song
born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.
(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)
September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
ROY FISHER As He Came Near Death
As he came near death things grew shallower for us:
We’d lost sleep and now sat muffled in the scent of tulips, the medical odours, and the street sounds going past, going away;
And he, too, slept little, the morphine and the pink light the curtains let through floating him with us,
So that he lay and was worked out on to the skin of his life and left there,
And we had to reach only a little way into the warm bed to scoop him up.
A few days, slow tumbling escalators of visitors and cheques, and something like popularity;
During this time somebody washed him in a soap called Narcissus and mounted him, frilled with satin, in a polished case.
Then the hole: this was a slot punched in a square of plastic grass rug, a slot lined with white polythene, floored with dyed green gravel.
The box lay in it; we rode in the black cars round a corner, got out into our coloured cars and dispersed in easy stages.
After a time the grave got up and went away.
ROY FISHER The Memorial Fountain
The fountain plays
through summer dusk in gaunt shadows,
black constructions
against a late clear sky,
water in the basin
where the column falls
shaking,
rapid and wild,
in cross-waves, in back-waves,
the light glinting and blue,
as in a wind
though there is none,
Harsh
skyline!
Far-off scaffolding
bitten against the air.
Sombre mood
in the presence of things,
no matter what things;
respectful sepia.
This scene:
people on the public seats
embedded in it, darkening
intelligences of what’s visible;
private, given over, all of them –
Many scenes.
Still sombre.
As for the fountain:
nothing in the describing
beyond what shows
for anyone;
above all
no ‘atmosphere’.
It’s like this often –
I don’t exaggerate.
And the scene?
a thirty-five-year-old man,
poet,
by temper, realist,
watching a fountain
and the figures round it
in garish twilight,
working
to distinguish an event
from an opinion;
this man,
intent and comfortable –
Romantic notion.
1969MICHAEL LONGLEY Persephone
I
I see as through a skylight in my brain
The mole strew its buildings in the rain,
The swallows turn above their broken home
And all my acres in delirium.
II
Straitjacketed by cold and numskulled
Now sleep the welladjusted and the skilled –
The bat folds its wing like a winter leaf,
The squirrel in its hollow holds aloof.
III
The weasel and ferret, the stoat and fox
Move hand in glove across the equinox.
I can tell how softly their footsteps go –
Their footsteps borrow silence from the snow.
DOUGLAS DUNN A Removal from Terry Street
On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus US Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.
DOUGLAS DUNN On Roofs of Terry Street
Television aerials, Chinese characters
In the lower sky, wave gently in the smoke.
Nest-building sparrows peck at moss,
Urban flora and fauna, soft, unscrupulous.
Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.
A builder is repairing someone’s leaking roof.
He kneels upright to rest his back.
His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.
NORMAN MACCAIG Wild Oats
Every day I see from my window
pigeons, up on a roof ledge – the males
are wobbling gyroscopes of lust.
Last week a stranger joined them, a snowwhite
pouting fantail,
Mae West in the Women’s Guild.
What becks, what croo-croos, what
demented pirouetting, what a lack
of moustaches to stroke.
The females – no need to be one of them
to know
exactly what they were thinking – pretended
she wasn’t there
and went dowdily on with whatever
pigeons do when they’re knitting.
IAIN CRICHTON SMITH Shall Gaelic Die?
Translated by the author
1
A picture has no grammar. It has neither evil nor good. It has only colour, say orange or mauve.
Can Picasso change a minister? Did he make a sermon to a bull?
Did heaven rise from his brush? Who saw a church that is orange?
In a world like a picture, a world without language, would your mind go astray, lost among objects?
2
Advertisements in neon, lighting and going out, ‘Shall it… shall it… Shall Gaelic… shall it… shall Gaelic… die?’
3
Words rise out of the country. They are around us. In every month in the year we are surrounded by words.
Spring has its own dictionary, its leaves are turning in the sharp wind of March, which opens the shops.
Autumn has its own dictionary, the brown words lying on the bottom of the loch, asleep for a season.
Winter has its own dictionary, the words are a blizzard building a to
wer of Babel. Its grammar is like snow.
Between the words the wild-cat looks sharply across a No-Man’s-Land, artillery of the Imagination.
4
They built a house with stones. They put windows in the house, and doors. They filled the room with furniture and the beards of thistles.
They looked out of the house on a Highland world, the flowers, the glens, distant Glasgow on fire.
They built a barometer of history.
Inch after inch, they suffered the stings of suffering.
Strangers entered the house, and they left.
But now, who is looking out with an altered gaze?
What does he see?
What has he got in his hands? A string of words.
5
He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander who loses his language loses his world.
The space ship that goes astray among planets loses the world.
In an orange world how would you know orange? In a world without evil how would you know good?
Wittgenstein is in the middle of his world. He is like a spider.
The flies come to him. ‘Cuan’ and ‘coill’ rising.
When Wittgenstein dies, his world dies.
The thistle bends to the earth. The earth is tired of it.
6
I came with a ‘sobhrach’ in my mouth. He came with a ‘primrose’.
A ‘primrose by the river’s brim’. Between the two languages, the word ‘sobhrach’ turned to ‘primrose’.
Behind the two words, a Roman said ‘prima rosa’.
The ‘sobhrach’ or the ‘primrose’ was in our hands. Its reasons belonged to us.
W. S. GRAHAM Malcolm Mooney’s Land 1970
I
Today, Tuesday, I decided to move on
Although the wind was veering. Better to move
Than have them at my heels, poor friends
I buried earlier under the printed snow.
From wherever it is I urge these words
To find their subtle vents, the northern dazzle
Of silence cranes to watch. Footprint on foot
Print, word on word and each on a fool’s errand.
Malcolm Mooney’s Land. Elizabeth
Was in my thoughts all morning and the boy.
Wherever I speak from or in what particular
Voice, this is always a record of me in you.
I can record at least out there to the west
The grinding bergs and, listen, further off
Where we are going, the glacier calves
Making its sudden momentary thunder.
This is as good a night, a place as any.
2
From the rimed bag of sleep, Wednesday,
My words crackle in the early air.
Thistles of ice about my chin,
My dreams, my breath a ruff of crystals.
The new ice falls from canvas walls.
O benign creature with the small ear-hole,
Submerger under silence, lead
Me where the unblubbered monster goes
Listening and makes his play.
Make my impediment mean no ill
And be itself a way.
A fox was here last night (Maybe Nansen’s,
Reading my instruments.) the prints
All round the tent and not a sound.
Not that I’d have him call my name.
Anyhow how should he know? Enough
Voices are with me here and more
The further I go. Yesterday
I heard the telephone ringing deep
Down in a blue crevasse.
I did not answer it and could
Hardly bear to pass.
Landlice, always my good bedfellows,
Ride with me in my sweaty seams.
Come bonny friendly beasts, brother
To the grammarsow and the word-louse,
Bite me your presence, keep me awake
In the cold with work to do, to remember
To put down something to take back.
I have reached the edge of earshot here
And by the laws of distance
My words go through the smoking air
Changing their tune on silence.
3
My friend who loves owls
Has been with me all day
Walking at my ear
And speaking of old summers
When to speak was easy.
His eyes are almost gone
Which made him hear well.
Under our feet the great
Glacier drove its keel.
What is to read there
Scored out in the dark?
Later the north-west distance
Thickened towards us.
The blizzard grew and proved
Too filled with other voices
High and desperate
For me to hear him more.
I turned to see him go
Becoming shapeless into
The shrill swerving snow.
4
Today, Friday, holds the white
Paper up too close to see
Me here in a white-out in this tent of a place
And why is it there has to be
Some place to find, however momentarily
To speak from, some distance to listen to?
Out at the far-off edge I hear
Colliding voices, drifted, yes
To find me through the slowly opening leads.
Tomorrow I’ll try the rafted ice.
Have I not been trying to use the obstacle
Of language well? It freezes round us all.
5
Why did you choose this place
For us to meet? Sit
With me between this word
And this, my furry queen.
Yet not mistake this
For the real thing. Here
In Malcolm Mooney’s Land
I have heard many
Approachers in the distance
Shouting. Early hunters
