Rich Day

Here's a Norman MacCaig poem taken from the pictured, 2010 auto-biography by Andrew Greig ... I've never found it in any of MacCaig's other published works?

Would be interested if anyone can point to anywhere else its actually been published??

I am a bit of a MacCaig fan, and this poem, Rich Day, completely encapsulates Northern Scotland for me:


RICH DAY

All day we fished
the loch clasped in the throat
of Canisp, that scrawny mountain,
and caught trout and
invisible treasures.

We walked home, ragged millionaires,
our minds jingling, our fingers
rustling the air.

And now, lying on the warm sand,
we see
the rim of the full moon
rest on a formal corrugation of water
at the feet of
a Britannia cloud:
sea and sky, one golden sovereign
that will never be spent.

 ---

Norman MacCaig (1910 – 1996)

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