"Where the River Meets the Sea" (1997) by John Mackie

1. Garmach

S/he who hunts for forebears
Through the archive at Elgin
Knows that the past is never sepia
Except as the result of technical naïveté
In the mechanism of memory or the chemistry of light.
In my father's mind there was but black and white.

Look
That woman who with her empty creel
Waits in weeds on the Buckie fish quay
For a spume broken glimpse through a heaving sea
Of a garnering ship that long since sits
Flanks and planks agape, asunder
On the tumbled rocks of Elgol
Below the headless crofts
That died alone
When the people, driven, went
From the land agent's fire
And the landlord's rent.

Not yet spent
Is the taste of the flesh
Of seabird's eggs
That sea wrack taste
That he learned to endure
Of bird rendered par
Plucked from the jaws
Of the searing white sky
Gathered in clutches
From the teeming shore
Of Tern Island's crouch
Low on the Spey

At Tugnet perched on the jaws of the river
Prowling again, ready to bite
Its own forcing channel
Through the huddle of Kingston,
The fishing museum is a snapshot too
The salmon an idol rendered in plaster
The faces of fishers close to the bone
Positions frozen in the rhythm of effort:
In this designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
My father aloud remembered
Who never came home
From the tumult of waters that closed in on their eyes
As the ravenous drag-netting flow took its dues
Amongst the fishers of Garmach.

And his brother my uncle
Loudly contemptuous of change
The Shire engineers had sought to enforce
By blasting a mouth to bite on the frenzy
That sent cottagers scattering as the waters rose
With the might of far mountains
As their drift snows unfroze:
Emissaries of granite
The first floods took back
A mile's width of plain from the scratchings of men.
How long was his love for that river
In its unbound abandon
And the headlong salmon
Soaring high from its spate
And how broad his contempt
For the efforts of those
Who tried to impose
The violence of order
On its deep dark flow.


2. The Clachan

From the Braes close by Sconser
You can glimpse it across
The reflections of mountains broken by Orca:
The hamlet of Clachan on Maclean's Rathasair
Strung out like pebbles randomly there. See
A small white house on the lip of the sea
Backed by a cliftan that hoods it in lee
Where a limpeting aunt, clinging on,
Gallinaceous in both aspect and voice
Celebrated her centenary
As a consequence of choice.

In exile in Moray the places remain
In vivid incarnations
Of the spirit of place
Arduish, Oskaig, Suishnish, Rathasair
That Sorley invokes on every page
Of a landscape that lives in every soul
That grew by its lochans
Heron speared, bold,
Or foraged for cockles
In the old harbour's bowl.

Though the Sound in its violence roars
(Impossible to broach)
And the breath of the Arctic icy and frantic
Colludes with Winter's reproach
The enduring sensations are wide blue and clear
And the shadows of woodlands
Harbouring deer.

She speaks the names
Like a liturgy of peace
And peoples her memory
With strong honest kin:
Women whose work was all of a piece
In hewing and setting the cornerstones of weathering
And dark bearded men whose gathering guile
Kept the pot in every cottage, croft,
Filled with the herring, mackerel, cod
And the laird's lost yearlings.
Mutton and venison taken by night
The fish by day
On the Sound's glacial light


3. Garmouth

Where the river meets the sea they returned
To tend the plot they took back by hand
From rank and gross neglect
And each for all the generations of us
Makes vivid the times
Before their currents intertwined
Mingled breath and gave voice
To my brothers'
And lately, to mine:

Like the Arctic Terns of the Spey
And the sea cleaving otters of Clachan
Neat on Raasay's shore
The exiles I've taken
(With my father's search for more, meaning enough,
Or my own, running from unease of place
Or the ambiguous myths I made to beguile
And to make it easier to seem than to be)
Have circled me back
Day by year's long day
To where I sit to breathe awhile
On the rocks of Arduish
Or by the Spey's swollen race
Where both Ted Hughe's tooth and claw
And Sorley's gentle geomancy are.

The black and white images
From my families' albums
Teem in my stillness
Like circling Terns.

"Port Bou" (1933) by Sylvia Townshend Warner

Through the ruined walls
the unflawed sea.
And to the smell of sunned
earth and of salt
sea is added a third
smell that cries; Halt!
I am what will be

familiar to you
by this journey's end.
I am, stale, the smell
of the fire that quenced
the fire on this hearth, that brought
down these walls, that wrenched
this wound in the ground.

I am the smell
on all the winds of Spain.
I am the stink in the nostrils
of the men of Spain.
I have taken the place
of the incense at the burial,
I have usurped the breath
of the rose plucked for the bridal,
I am the odour of the wreath
that is held out for heroes
to behold and breathe.
I cordial the heart,
I refresh the brain,
I strengthen the resolved fury
of those who fight for Spain.

"Some make this answer" by Sylvia Townshend Warner

Unfortunately, he said, I have lost my manners.
That old civil twitch of visage and the retreat
Courteous of threatened blood to the heart, I cannot
Produce them now, or rig up their counterfeit.
Thrust muzzle of flesh, master, or metal, you are no longer
Terrible as an army with banners.
Admittedly on your red face or your metal proxy’s
I read death, I decipher the gluttony to subdue
All that is free and fine, to savage it, knock it
About, taunt it to stupor, prison it life-through;
Moreover, I see you garnished with whips, gas-bombs, electric
barbed wire,
And affable with church and state as with doxies.
Voltage of death, walking among my fellow men
Have seen the free and the fine wasted with cold and hunger,
Diseased, maddened, death-in-life doomed, and the ten
Thousand this death can brag have reckoned against your thousand.
Shoddy king of terrors, you impress me no longer.

"Drawing You, Heavy with Sleep" (1932) by Sylvia Townshend Warner

Drawing you, heavy with sleep to lie closer,
Staying your poppy head upon my shoulder,
It was as though I pulled the glide
Of a fun river to my side.
Heavy with sleep and with sleep pliable
You rolled at a touch towards me. Your arm fell
Across me as a river throws
An arm of flood across meadows.
And as the careless water its mirroring sanction
Grants to him at the river’s brim long stationed,
Long drowned in thought; that yet he lives
Since in that mirroring tide he moves,
Your body lying by mine to mine responded:
Your hair stirred on my mouth, my image was dandled
Deep in your sleep that flowed unstained
On from the image entertained.

"The Sick Assailant" (1936) by Anna Wickham

I hit her in the face because she loved me.
It was the challenge of her faithfulness that moved me.
For she knew me, every impulse, every mood,
As if my veins had run with her heart's blood.
She knew my damned incontinence, my weakness,
Yet she forebore with her accursed meekness.
I could have loved her had she ever blamed me,
It was her sticky irritating patience shamed me.
I was tired-sick. It was her business to amuse me,
Her faith could only daunt me and confuse me.
She was a fine great wench, and well I knew
She was one good half panther, one half shrew,
Then why should my love, more than any other,
Induce in her the silly human Mother?
She would have nursed me, bathed me, fed me, carried me.
She'd have burned her soul to thaw me, she'd have married me.
I hit her in the face because she loved me,
It was her sticky irritating patience moved me.

"Prelude" (1935) by Edith Sitwell

FOR GEOFFREY GORER


WHEN our long sun into the dark had set
And made but winter branches of his rays
—I left my heart.
                            So doth a shadow leave
The body when our long dark sun is gone.

Now the black chaos of the Polar night
Melts in the hearts of the forgotten Dead;
—The tears turned ice about each loveless head
Are changed into bird-plumaged bird-voiced springs
And the sap rises like a bird that sings.

The cold wind creaking in my plant-shrill blood
Seems spring beginning in some earthen bud
Though immemorial, the winter's shade
Furred my cold blood wherein plant, beast, are laid,
In that dark earth from which shall spring the soul

As dark and broken hints of sciences
Forgotten, and strange satyrine alliances
Of beast and soul lie hidden in the old
Immensity and desert of the cold.

Hoarse as a dog's bark the furled heavy leaves
Are hairy as a dog: furred fire barks for the shape
Of hoarse-voiced animals; cold air agape
hines to be shut in the water's shape and plumes;
All things break from the imprisoning winter's glooms;

All things, all hearts awake—
Until the gold within the miser's heart
Would buy the siren isles and many a chart
From dream to dream, and the death-blinded eyes
See beyond wild bird-winged discoveries.

All creatures praise the sun in their degree:
The mother bear with thick forestial fur
And grumbling footsteps, lumbering primal sleep
Of the winter earth, as furry as a bear
And grumbling deep,No longer sees her cubs as a black blot
As clots of thick black darkness; primal form
Is shaped from that thick night—
Begins from this black chaos: life is light.

The stunted long-armed gardener mossed as trees
Has known before his birth—
For he was born and shaped close to the earth—
Best of all things are water, and hot gold
Of the rough fruitful sun: best of all things are these.
So the slow gold of his hot days and rays
Ripened within our earth and changed to fruits,
So the cold twisted water changed to roots
Of apple-trees.

But I, a harpy like a nightingale,
A nightingale that seems a harpy, mourn
With my heart changed now from a black blind stone
That rolls down the abyss, to a ghost gone
Or a black shadow cast
Upon the dust where gossips of mean Death—
The small and gilded scholars of the Fly
That feed upon the crowds and their dead breath
Still buzz and stink where the bright heroes die
Of the dust's rumours and the old world's fevers.
Sometimes in the arena like a drum
My heart sounds, calls the heroes from their shade
Till with the march of tides, those tall ghosts come
Where Fortune, Virtue, Folly, Wisdom, these—
Mimes garbed as aeons, by horizons bound—
With monstrous trumperings of suns at war
Amid earth-quaking rumour of crowds whispering
And bull-voiced bellowings of tropic light
Contend...
                 And the huge bulk of Folly fell
From her world-height in the arena. Hell
Has dyed its fires upon the fairest faces
And where the hero smiled, bare Death grimaces.
But one who changed the complexion of all nights,
Whose lips have fired Persepolis, to me
Spoke then of eagle-winged Icarian flights
Of the steel men across an ageless sea,
And continents and quays where the one nation
Of the blind smiling statues still abide
Beneath giant suns whose sound no man hath known.
And huge horizons and the enchanted tide,
The azure unattainable and wide,
These they have known, and in their marble veins
Are all the summer sorrow of the rose,
And siren waves.
                            In the agonic noon
When the black pyres and pyramids of shade
Are mute as solemn and revengeful ghosts
Left from the tombs of night, I, a ghost laid,
Walk like a ghost among the city ways

Pressed on by hungry continents of stone.

Pressed on by hungry continents of stone.
Yet still the light brings life to those unborn
And still the statues hear the sirens' song
Across the deep-boughed gardens of the sea.
Where the first founts and the deep waterways
Of the young light flow down and lie like peace
Upon the upturned faces of the blind,
The crooked has a shadow light makes straight,
The shallow places gain their depth again,
It comes to bless;
And man-made chasms between man and man
Of creeds and tongues are filled.
                                                    The guiltless light
Remakes all things and men in holiness.

"Maternal Love Triumphant, or, Song of the Virtuous Female Spider" by Ruth Pitter

Time was I had a tender heart,
But time hath proved its foe;
That tenderness did all depart,
And it is better so;
For it tender did remain
How could I play my part,
That must so many young sustain?
Farewell the tender heart!

A swain had I, a loving swain,
A spider neat and trim,
Who used no little careful pain
To make me dote on him.
The fairest flies he brought to me,
At first I showed disdain;
For lofty we must ever be
To fix a loving swain.

But soon I bowed to nature's ends
And soon did wed my dear,
For all at last to nature bends;
So in a corner near
We fixed our web, and thought that love
For toil would make amends;
For so all creatures hope to prove
Who bow to nature's ends.

Ere long the sorry scrawny flies
For me could not suffice,
So I prepared with streaming eyes
My love to sacrifice.
I ate him, and could not but feel
That I had been most wise;
An hopeful mother needs a meal
Of better meat than flies.

My eggs I laid, and soon my young
Did from the same creep out:
Like little cupids there they hung
Or trundled round about;
And when alarmed, like a soft ball
They all together clung;
Ah mothers! We are paid for all,
Who watch our pretty young.

For their sweet sake I do pursue
And slay whate'er I see;
Nothing's too much for me to do
To feed my progeny;
They'll do the same for me some day -
(Did someone say Says You?)
So still I leap upon the prey
And everything pursue.

Two bluebottles that loved so dear
Fell in my web together;
They prayed full fast and wept for fear,
But I cared not a feather;
Food I must have, and plenty too,
That would my darlings rear,
So, thanking heaven, I killed and slew
The pair that loved so dear.

But most do I delight to kill
Those pretty silly things
That do themselves with nectar fill
And wag their painted wings;
For I above all folly hate
That vain and wasted skill
Which idle flowers would emulate
And so the fools I kill.

Confess I may some virtue claim,
For all that I desire
Is first an honest matron's name,
Than which there is none higher;
And then my pretty children's good -
A wish that bears no blame;
These in my lonely widowhood
As virtues I may claim.

I look not here for my reward,
But recompense shall come
When from this toilsome life and hard
I seek a heavenly home;
Where in the mansions of the blest,
By earthly ills unmarred,
I'll meet again my Love, my best
And sole desired reward.