My life running to the seas

Running rest-day ...

... and here's another of my favourites from Sorley Maclean's (truly) marvellous 2011 collected poems - a long one, but worth persisting with:


GLEN EYRE

There is a little island in my memory,
lying on a sea of ten years,
a clear distant melancholy island,
an evening of longing and of thoughts,
and I alone and lonely
above the raised beach of Eyre.

The Sound was ruffled with north-west wind,
the south chill and thick,
the rugged head of Blaven misty and morose,
a glimmering clarity in the north-west,
putting a white pool about my longing
and about the bent grass of Glen Eyre.

That evening on the ridge
I realised the unhappy thing:
that there was a wall between joy
and my harsh little croft,
a boundary that would not be changed
to set joy free:

that my cows would not get at the pasture
that is on the far side of the march
in spite of every struggle and persistence,
though MacLeans and MacLeods,
Nicolsons and MacDonalds
were urging their claim:

that I would not get the thing that I wanted
with the gift of my environment and heredity
and with another gift, my talents;
that I could not stand on Blaven
and stay in the garden
where fruits were growing richly.

and though I were to climb Blaven,
it was only a mean mountain
from which I would not see a freedom of grasslands,
when my desire was on Kilimanjaro,
the Matterhorn and Nanga Parbit
and the height of Everest.

And though I stayed where I was
without the toil and cold of the tops,
that my desire, the red ripe fragrant apple,
would not fall into my hands,
and that it was not to be reached with the surpassing effort
or with pride any more.

And my desire had left the heights
since I had seen the fresh apple,
the fragrant, delicate, exotic apple:
I would not get the satisfaction of the garden
nor any comfort on the heights,
with the divisive passion of my spirit.

My life running to the seas
through heather, bracken and bad grass,
on its fanked eerie course,
like the mean and shallow stream
that was taking its meagre way through a green patch
to the sea in the Kyle.

But again and again a spring tide came
to put beauty on the river foot,
to fill its destination with richness,
and sea-trout and white-bellied salmon came
to taste the water of the high hills
with flood-tide in Inver Eyre.

But base the sea-trout and white-bellied salmon
when one eye was on the top of the high hills
and the other on the beautiful apple:
and mountain and apple would not come to concord,
nor any kind of beauty on the fields,
about the shallow burn of Glen Eyre.

---

Sorley Maclean - btw 1932-1940