Author: Duncan MacNae

The road is narrow, bordered with barley
The cars are fast, flashing headlights
No patience for tiddlers searching for history
The tyres are thin
The track is stony
The route is predestined (Oh, rich despair)
Oncoming traffic in middle of road
A score of car slaughtered grouse
Along the motorways’ heathery shoulder
Hills emptied of houses, furrows of old fields,
Flowery invaders crowd the highlands
Food for dinosaurs, legacy of German botanists
But no nineteenth century tour, this
modern quest is low on petrol
And at the farmstand in Fife
I scare an old man in a Vauxhall
Driving the wrong side
His eyes tell the story, brought together on 
Our doubly predestined trajectory over all those miles of wandering
Hurtling mad through roundabouts of industrial estates
Dancing contrarywise with lorries
The rope dance of single track through faery woods
Hurtling down concrete terror chute
Stop for Urqhhart’s shoving Germans 
Tesco tiger roll Nessie sandwich
Our hosts are appalled at the distances we relate
In our dusty land across the water
Where road is narrow, bordered with wheatfields
Where we drive seven hundred miles in a day
Always looking for something new
Eyes scanning the horizon for the pillar of fire and smoke
The new job, new car, a new house, new shoes,  the next big thing
Land of Opportunity, Land of Promise
Only a railroad ticket away, sagebrush streaming past the window,
or three month’s walk, or we can get there Wednesday
If we push it and the fuel pump holds.
What will you find there?
Old orchards full of dying trees
An old house with broken windows
The dry well, tattered posters from country fairs that will never come again
Vague memories of the world that was
Fear of the wind that is coming
Comfort in love, and friendship in despite.

Two ravens -  
One silent facing south
Toward a poisoned land
Land of unfulfilled dreams
The other, massive bill
Clacking, feathers raised along 
Its crest, looks north
Looks toward a place
That might yet be
Unreal country
The dead horse, human kind,
The strangled river
Sits in the middle
Suspended animation
Neither fond memory
Nor bold plan
But a space of stillness
This moment building into power.

Round river boulder of the past
Heavy gray granite of history
I claw at you, fingernails 
Scrabbling for purchase, shoulder
Straining to keep you encircled 
In my grasp, palms pressing 
Rugosities friction heaving the weight
Past my knees.

Why lift this heavy stone?
This smooth stone of history best 
Perhaps to let it lie forgotten in the willows
By the dark river

I lift it because it is the stone
Of my heart, unfading realization
Wordless in the pit of my stomach
Sense of belonging to a wronged people
Refusal to take the thin soup
And forget.

I lift the stone because to let it lie
Forgotten in the willows
Is to lose my own life, to be lost
Forever to my people, to forget
Is to forsake the solemn dignity 
Of a stolen past.

I lift the stone because of the anger
In my heart, rage in my head and heart
Driving me relentless to clear away
Spoils of burned houses, abandoned
False dreams like old cars on the side
Of a scabland road, twisted roots of lies,
Rocks of hate clogging the life-springs of my people.

My people! Atavistic phrase, worrying
Politicians and historians, raising visions
Of new nations perpetuating old wrongs
But hot-headed I proclaim that there was
Nothing but the general human condition
To be ashamed of in our stolen past
Much to love, much to mourn

And the time when the big city taxi driver 
Threw the Nova Scotia boatbuilder out of the cab
When, accustomed to the open air, 
The git spat his chaw full on the 
San Francisco isinglass window 
And his kids with their mismatched shoes
To walk across foggy hills.

Let sadness follow upon sadness,
Song follow on song, stone rest upon stone.

New Scotland waiting to be born
These letters are for you, my love
To you, country of the empty mountains
Land of abandonment, I sing for you in exile
Your sky slashing sgurrs
golden days on silver beaches
Stir my heart
Ancient oak woods of my soul -
Fallen strength filling memory. 
From far away in a hard white land
Far, very far, from the song of your 
Waves and eternal wind
I send you an exile’s fanatic love.
I sing you dreams of republic and a hundred
Thousand farms, long vanished, alive still
Under the stones of old crofts
Burning still under the dark water
Singing still in the buttery wind 
That shakes the end of your long winter
All the desperate hopes of this dwindling age
Come to fruition on your bracken yellow hills
Alba nuadh, new Scotland of my heart, 
Waiting to be born.

Here is the letter you asked for in the pop song
(Fichead bliadnha, twenty years ago, thirty – 
I’m sorry I took so long –  I didn’t know where you lived)
Here in the rainy dawn filled with wounding words
Old wrongs, the rain drumming cadences 
Of the lost work songs
War of wind in the branches, almost I can hear
The children singing clattering pebbles in the surf
Mouth music lilting list of the places we fled
No more, no more, no more
Mournful refrain in the rainy spring daybreak.
Here is the letter you asked for in your song.
Here are the times, sweet sheltered places 
In the sagebrush, exposés of fading farm towns
Memoranda of the drowned lands, the fleeing
People settled down, until dust and wind
Drive us on again. Here is the résumé of our fears
Secret dispatches from the land of promise
Promised land, land of the big idea, 
Land of the second chance installment plan
Here is the catalog of our tears
Fond recollection of the vanished place
Tedious remembrances of trudging
Dusty roads possessions pressing sweaty 
Against our backs
Here is the burden of our hope
Here is the letter you asked for in your song.

Poems for a new Scotland, filled with promise, from a land full of promises.

Whatever Scotland is to me
Be it aye pairt o’ a’ men see
O’ Earth and o’ Eternity

Wha winna hide their heids in’t till
It seems the haill o’ Space to fill
As ‘twere an unsurmounted hill.

He canna Scotland see wha yet
Canna see the Infinite
And Scotland in true scale to it.

	From “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”, Hugh MacDiarmid

The south and the west looked on and the moon came
When the wind went down and the sea was sorry
And the singing slow.

Ask how the sunset looked between the wind going
Down and the moon coming up and I would struggle
To tell the how of it.

I give you fire here, I give you water, I give you
The wind that blew them across and across
The scooping mixing wind.


       From “How Yesterday Looked”, Carl Sandburg