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.
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Letters from America
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
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