The University of the Self #31
Some poems in response to the Orkneys - visitation through research
I have been very busy of late and suffering from a number of exacerbated physical and mental health issues. I will be busy this weekend facilitating a workshop and will need a few days afterwards to recover, then I have a very stressful matter to attend to in the next couple of weeks which I must conserve energy for, so I will do my very best to keep on top of content on my beloved Substack.
For now, I leave you with a number of poems which I have written over the years, inspired by my deep love of the landscapes, history, nature, mythology, literature and language (I have studied Orkney Norn / dialect as much as possible) of the Orkney Islands — a place I have dreamed of visitng. Until then (may it one day happen), please allow me to demonstrate the effectiveness of place writing produced from ‘visits’ made through research. I hope you will agree that there is a validity in writing this way. I cannot get there physically, but the place has had an amazing effect upon my place writing creativity. Research is inexhaustible, and I love it so much for that.
I will never have the chance to ‘test’ these theories out as part of a PhD, but that does not mean that I cannot test them out for myself, make my own decisions, experiment and come to my own conclusions. Sharing them with you here makes me believe that I am not in this alone. I hope you enjoy them. Thank you for reading, as always.
Elizabeth wrote to me about Orkney light
Twenty-two hours of it, she says.
I picture her, shedding the smother of winter,
slipping the stifle of woolen skins, unbuttoning
what has kept out the chill, to emerge,
yarn-born. She feels the heat penetrate
her layers. She is glad to be rid of the itch
Elizabeth says you can follow the glow
as it moves around the horizon.
That through the warmer months,
it never really fades. I want her to tell me
about staying awake through simmer dim.
So much light then so much night to follow.
Elizabeth’s letter mentions the winter gales,
how they howl to pieces everything you own.
How it seems there is only half a day
before dark. You do wonder sometimes,
Elizabeth says,
why you stay.
Elizabeth Alder (as was), do you remember
opening the pages at Births, Marriages, Deaths? Engagement is announced,
so the paper indelibly said. Elizabeth, your future was settled into print.
Its readers considered this news over kippers, misfired their forks, skittered
bulbs of kidney off the plate’s edge. Sniffed coffee, riddled the crusts
from their toast. Alan McKee, what is he thinking? Fixing on that unkan lass —
skin like flooery bannocks and him off to war! Elizabeth, do you remember
Millicent’s party — how the unaccustomed sherry made you thrill?
How Fred Somerville passed you the sugar, so his fingers could warp
with your own? Through the spectre of dancing, his palm soiled
your effigy skin — his mouth clung like a wound to your throat.
This going on and poor shell-shocked Alan away at the Somme!
You cannot forget the tethering of your arms round Freddie’s
beating chest. Dearly beloved, every cranny of your home is dull
with ghosts. Malice cramps the ceiling — muttering shrouds the floor.
Candles occult the fog as you sit, a wafer-riddled pyx — you are a leaf,
your life is a tomb. The dust chunters. The monolith cupboards loom.
Spirits spool the coving. Elizabeth, we are all sometimes guilty of wrong.
Once in a blue moon you laugh – the sound of it blisters the bleak
of your home. The shadows are quick to cure your glee, then cloy you
back under their coat. Litanies bind your widow-weed life —
I was a loving mother. I was a faithful wife. Elizabeth, you craved for Fred,
dreamed of him every night. Look to the crack in the kitchen door —
see the heel of bread, the feltry howe of gristled beef. Fancy stealing
your sister’s things! Hours you have wasted in the study of that teapot,
pride of place, willowing it pattern through the cabinet’s pane. Poor Flora,
questering high and low for the thing — accusations festering her tongue.
You wilt at the view of constant rain. You examine your buttons
as if they were clues, your claptrap of hairpins a riddle, your buckled shoes
a quiz. The teapot might one day squeal how you took it. Easily silenced,
you only have to hurl it from your hands. Every day, the coffin of your table
is tenaciously set up right — you should free yourself of the faffing.
Be rid of the humbug salvers, ditch the silly cellars of salt. Imagine the peace
of the kirkyard, the psalter-smell of books. The sink scums with memories —
your husband’s war-wound hirpling, your sister’s wheedling chat.
Come out to see the lupins, Lizzie if you will. You didn’t ought to have
come here just to rot. They’d come past your thigh, a heyse purple ocean —
you’d get whamsy on the scent. You need to crack the sashes, soak
in an Orkney sunrise, shiver those bad angels out. You didn’t learn
to love tulips — sick on your dresser, they parch with thirst.
Your fingers hang on the air like cruiks. Forgo the cardigans. Wool
will not bind an unknotted soul. Each one of your rooms is a crypt,
where skeletons roam their bones. It is always winter Elizabeth –
lowries of light swim from tapers, shoal the dark. April was always
the month you loved. Alan’s first kiss — a tide of wedding white. The baby
new in his cradle. The flowers your son brought you as he grew —
Elizabeth do you remember a child with arms full of blossom,
everything wearing the dew?
Notes
This poem is a further imagining, exploration and interpretation based on the life
of Elizabeth McKee, one of the many characters from the novel Greenvoe,
written by George Mackay Brown.
The Old Red Stones
groan beneath each island’s weight,
fracture,
shift
their slabbed flags, split
to show the fish in their fossil cores.
Settled sediment through the uncountable years,
pressed,
solidified,
formed —
gneisses and granite smothered,
Old Man of Hoy squatting his hard lava spew.
Ice took Orkney into its grip — glazing the rock, the belly
of glaciers pressed in clear devastation, metres thick.
Raw and scraped, the acres were skinned,
turned to till, d r a g g e d
into piled from miles around.
Scoured by winters, rain and wind, the sea circles its prey
like a wolf, eats up the coastline, gnaws away the land.
The greedy waters have gorged
the archaeology — the scant, barely left footprint
of the Mesolithic, the Neolithic stone.
So much will always be
unknown.
Stack
I was part of this, once. This great mass, this notched
and jagged old red coast. The sea is too keen a lover,
too fond of my sandstone taste. She runs her abrasions
along my rubric shaft — there is no hiding
from such passion. She broke my grip, eased me, pebble
by crack from Hoy’s clutch. Ever she wriggles her fissures
into the island’s bound. I lean against the savage wind —
it throws its gales about me, rasps its hurricanes, whips
a wet frenzy over my leg, skirts the outlines with persistent
breath. I was nestled, content to be land. Now I am left
to the ambition of Mallimacks, white-smeared pelagic
lime in a drooling baptism over my skull. In chiselled
loneliness I watch the opposite rock — a cracked sentinel
calling to the far mound of Ward Hill as it curls in sleep,
a fatly dormant beast. Through daytime light I turn to cast
myself in shadow across the facing cliff. I wish I could reach
its topping of delicate grass and put my length upon it, ease
the rough of my spine. Evening comes and I lie my ghost
on the water’s moon-silvered back — on a calm night
she has me lulled, sings me a song of history, tells me of all
she has seen. Scapa Flow is a hungry queen — cruel
yet sometimes kind, cold and often wild. I feel the skim
of Orkney charr flit beneath the waves, shoal and fin about
my feet. She will reclaim me. Will not rest her eroding tongue
till I am lost in her briny throat. I love when the climbers
come, tether me back to the mass with nylon lines — roped
with veins I feel that blood can run between me and the shoreline
again. They risk their lives upon my hide, thrill and gasp
at my heights. I feel their touch as they palm for holds, hook
their fingers in my cracks, smooth their chalk into crevices, hang
like just-fledged chicks, press their bodies so close I can hear
their hearts. Old Man — everyone seeks to conquer me and dance
on my crown. When I submit at last, I hope I shall be embalmed
by the Mirrie Dancers, flooding me their hues on phosphorescent
sky. I will submit to the drowning, offer my body to salt. I pray
there’s no pain, that there will still be stars above my sunken head.
Notes
The Old Man of Hoy is a sea stack reaching 449 feet high just off the coastline of the island of Hoy in the Orkney Islands. Created by sea erosion some time after 1750, it is at risk of collapsing into the sea. It is very popular with climbers.
The Westray Wife
Yeu had sleipt, fowr thowsand ages rund,
quietlik till sum body wonne yeu fra the airth.
Yeu wes fownde, a treasure brought tae licht.
I ken yeu have strang ee-bres, frowned into an M,
that yeu are sized fae the holding o’ a hand —
palme-nested body, thoum-straiked heid.
Preciouse, yeu are — not tae much fingered, not
tae scourie. Beryit in the midden o’ a fallen hous,
we guess at who yeu might have been and why
yeu wes dishantit. I think yeu are a copy
o’ the wedow who werked the ferme. I think yeu
wes pouerful rownid , thows big from hewing
oot the walls, lugging stane, fattering barlie, howing peat.
Yhur body, formit lyk a stack grew stout as you beamed
yhur wyntir-store, block by sorpy, bog-smell block,
grew stouter yhit with bairn after blossoming bairn
fae yeu wes fertil, Orkney Venus. This is how I see yeu,
muther-love and peedie kelties clinging tae the traff
of yhur thick-knyt shawl. Against yhur bosum, the oon
unthriving, keening lyk a thine byrde — the othirs
tareesin aboot and yeu, stuggering, boom-lung, hidder ye cum!
Yhur sawle is riflet upon yeu — sumquhill yeu wes worschipped,
nowtched with magick, ydoll o’ the hilland, has-been fae a time.
I see yeu nou, captive o’ the glass. Twa, if I cownt yhur reflection.
Galdragon, the auntient sint of legeand quirls abute yeu still.
Notes
The Trows of Orkney
Here cummen middlesummer —
wur mostest powerful tyme. Aye, the floods
of bless-ye sunshine, vein-full, bane-full,
magic-stuffed fro toe tae heid we are —
beware you beings o’ our whimsy-mischief,
tak your new born berns we might. Steal
your mammy. Mind ye skirt our mounds,
though music may bae merry in them, for
is trows have muchly passion for the dance.
Cummen ye in, foolheart if ye dares,
and find than just one minute o’ wur time
will spend yur years. We speed the sky
on bulwands yet we yearns tae scud the sea —
mind ye careless bigfolk when ye cast aside
yur shells. Gorge yur eggs but crush the rest —
make coracles we will o’ the unspoiled scoops,
take is over the foam. The first boht is wurs —
we sink the first we see. Keep an open Goodbook
oan your bed and knives above the door —
them as meets the fays will ken how much we hate
the Bible’s pages, cringe at steel.
Notes
Trow
Ring of Brodgar, deep
in Orkney earth.
Age has cajoled it into submission —
once its angles poked
straight at the sky.
A thousand lifetimes have snaggled
the tusks in their sockets, sunk
them in bloodless
gums. Leaning into bullets
of rain, it accepts the chafe
of elements, blooms
with moss. Bleeds
trapped water, cracks.
Sung thinner by licking songs of wind,
the stones sit quiet beneath the clout of the sky.
Two struck by lightning — the cost of living
beneath the might of air. I press my ear
along their knurly spines, strain
for the Neolithic thrum of deeper roots.
Ulie Stane, moored to a solitary point,
hopeful the equinox might once
more consider alignment with the head
of one so determinedly slanted.
The bite of henge in hillock, shadows
following the pathways of day.
Whit was hid for, Rachel Whaness’ womb?
A cavern ahint her belt-band, an un-filled kirn.
Just wance she thought she felt a letter-flee’s kindle,
thought at a seed had taken, clung like a kleck tae her flesh.
Thoo wakken and wush, for cleanliness is, hent yir hair
and wup hid back tae hids clew atop yir heid.
Rachel thoo were only doing God’s wark when
thoo let him atween yir legs, suffered the dob o him,
tilted tae help his claggy shald swim. Peetie’s sake,
there should hae been result. Thoo bide theesael ferfil still,
Rachel, rise wae yir phantom o a goonie un-lirked.
Cram yir catastrophe back into claes. Thank Heaven
for good thick tights. Did devotion make a skran
o differ for thoo? Just wance, Lord, let me had ane I
n me erms and be a mither tae hid. Thoo ken the toining
o yir voar — the ‘ears pass and all thoo raise is ime
fae all the cups thoo brew and let gin cowld, casting aboot
in the urgo bits for clues. Thoo and Stanley are holms —
nither will cross the scripture o air at splits thoo both.
Sometimes his filty fingers creep toward the unspoilt
thightness o yir waist and thoo pray the scream
oot o yir breath. Thoo canna even share the blame —
his germ was proved inby the warmth of Alice Voar,
at terrible time when Stanley sooked his joy fae a bottle neck
and sheu sat on her wall like a baited creel. He went
tae her skin and sheu birthed him a jewel o a child.
Whit God has joined. Tirl the ither cheek and stand
each dawn tae prog the ammers o the hearth,
bring the groal into being. The fettered Siloam tilters,
tethered against the lye-slipped quay — waits for her hull
tae be filled by Stanley, boots chapping weesks fae her beams.
Halfleens doon the path he turns tae smile and thoo ken
at yir hert is deid. Sometimes thoo feel like a knotless threid,
at every day is Gockeen Day, every oor a trick —
a skorie’s skrek taunts abuin yir heid. Whit was hid for,
Rachel Whaness’ womb? An archipelago o griefs,
a quietness o voices, numb. Thoo sit tae the table,
splitting pods, thumbing loose each rosary o paes.
Whit is love, Rachel Whaness?
Whit is love but tifts like these?
Notes
This poem is a deeper and further imagining, exploration and elaboration based on the life of Rachel Whaness, one of the many characters from the novel Greenvoe, written by George Mackay Brown. Deeply religious now, the couple did not have any children — a cause of much grief to Rachel. Her husband Stanley once had an affair with another women and they had a child together.
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