between the world and eternity

Hooray! It's National Poetry Day (one of my favourite days of the year!) and this year's theme is the environment.

And, by complete chance, I actually had occasion to wander past the marvelous Scottish Poetry Library building earlier this morning: thus the timely/appropriate photo above ;-)

Now; I do know that I blip Sorley MacLean's poetry fairly frequently --- but I simply cannot resist a lengthy excerpt to mark today's occasion - the verses which follow are taken from the truly stunning 'Poems for Eimhir', which is a long sequence of some sixty poems, originally written in Gaelic, and widely considered to be MacLean's masterpiece.

The poems deal with the intertwining themes of love, history and the environment; with the verses below ranging across areas of Skye and the West Highlands - and, as I re-read these verses, I'm taken right back to my last visit to Skye ... to Oronsay, to the MacLeod's Maidens, the sight/taste of Talisker ... they're all immediately in my mind's eye :-))

Happy National Poetry Day!


‘Poems for Eimhir’

XLI
My love

My love for you has gone beyond poetry,
beyond imagination, beyond pride,
beyond love-talk, beyond hummed song,
beyond art, beyond laughter-music,
beyond joy, beyond loveliness,
beyond grief, beyond agony,
beyond reason, beyond nature,
beyond the great surging world.

XLII
Shores

If we were in Talisker on the shore
where the great white mouth
opens between two hard jaws,
Rubha nan Clach and the Bioda Ruadh,
I would stand beside the sea
renewing love in my spirit
while the ocean was filling
Talisker bay forever:
I would stand there on the bareness of the shore
until Prishal bowed his stallion head.

And if we were together
on Calgary shore in Mull,
between Scotland and Tiree,
between the world and eternity,
I would stay there till doom
measuring sand, grain by grain,
and in Uist, on the shore of Homhsta
in presence of that wide solitude,
I would wait there forever
for the sea draining drop by drop.

And if I were on the shore of Moidart
with you, for whom my care is new,
I would put up in a synthesis of love for you
the ocean and the sand, drop and grain.
And if we were on Mol Stenscholl Staffin
when the unhappy surging sea dragged
the boulders and threw them over us,
I would build the rampart wall
against an alien eternity grinding (its teeth).

XLIII
Blue Rampart

But for you the Cuillin would be
an exact and serrated blue rampart
girdling with its march-wall
all that is my fierce heart.

But for you the sand
that is in Talisker compact and white
would be a measureless plain to my expectations
and on it the spear desire would not turn back.

But for you the oceans
in their unrest and their repose
would raise the wave-crests of my mind
and settle them on a high serenity.

And the brown brindled moorland
and my reason would co-extend -
but you imposed on them an edict
above my own pain.

And on a distant luxuriant summit
there blossomed the Tree of Strings,
among its leafy branches your face,
my reason and the likeness of a star.

 ---

Sorley MacLean (1911 – 1996)

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