Poetry - Love and Revolution |
Love and Revolution - Poetry of Alastair McIntosh "He howls his poems like a wild man" - Nizlopi
10 Poems - a representative selection from the work
ExtinctionHave you heard the cry of the curlew? I tell you – I would rather we lost the entire contents of every art gallery in the whole world than lose forever the cry of the curlew
(Click here to hear the sound set to music, by Loriana Pauli of Berneray (3 mins MP3) Murdo of Assynt
I took you to hear the unknown Assynt poet with tales of tigers crossing by the Forth Road Bridge and more humanity engrimed upon a finger than knaves and chancers scrape from all their privilege And there we found him lying in a doorway up an alley taking shelter where they go to share a fag crashed out amongst the boxes and the bottles huddled embryonic in a frozen sleeping bag And let us pay respects to Murdo, love let us eulogise the witness that he rhymes bard from off the croft cast out on stony ground Boating in
Some things you never lose like when David took us sailing sharing thoughts of poetry and form and rowing back the tender to the pier I twisted oars in symmetry of perfect counterpoint an exquisitely executed turn gliding with precision into dock He remarked, impressed, and I confess a pleasing swell of pride the thought that skill from Hebridean boyhood held its edge thirty years along this western bank
the Great Some things you never lose like rowing a boat drift angled, crosswind, no great hurry we’ll arrive, my dear, when time ordains with strength of arms and keel of oak as oars dip softly through the diamond sparkle of each wave and lapping clinker rhythm dapples dancing over larch and fathomless the melody of currents in my soul soaring with the poetry of knowing you from inside out singing to myself from outside in and turned back round again at being seen by you, desired by you… … it is your love that I’m in love with… some things you never lose
The Forge
What is the point of land reform so that remote communities can be preserved as threatened cultures at a massive social cost to the nation as a whole of teachers, doctors, police and ferry services when most of those raised native from such soil are now so few and only have two kids who’ve mostly moved elsewhere to stay their burns and braes seductive now to ever-higher bidders from away with little thought or want for joining in God’s rhythm of the crofters’ passing day … and most who ‘ever mattered’ here are dead or spread or going gone the beauty of a people’s life strewn like cemetery flowers and even markings on the land are fossils fading down the years with only gales and rain to carve a soaring waterfall, of tears?
Either we turn our faces to the wall burn out, sell out or jumping from the bridge choose at least the honest statement of heartbreak hotel’s check-out … or else we muscle down roll up our sleeves and dig from where we stand to shovel ruddied muddied ores of melded human sand and stoke the glowing hearth anew to smelt and skim and pour a precious shimmering stream refined by sense of place and ancient lore (like hodden lead ripped off in time from round the ruin’s sill and fired until it crumbles to a freshened mercurial rill) then on the ringing anvil to a meteor shower of sparks we strike the tempering ingot, dreaming new and old hallmarks … and hammer
out the beauty, of the braided crofting way … which is our greatest export, to this world that’s gone astray… and that’s the point of land reform in the politics of today.
(Also published in The Crofter, journal of the Scottish Crofting Foundation, No. 73, Dec. 2006, p. 5) After Culloden
The hard recruiting sergeants Scottish regiments for English battles potato famine later economic dearth and half a million Scots not to mention Irish directly or by circumstance driven from their land As was for the Iraqi Kurds so was for the Gaelic ones ‘You see,’ said the Iranian scholar: ‘We are looking at a common history’ an archetypal commonality of suppurating colonisation perpetuation and re-perpetuation broken emigrants breaking First Nations hunting Aborigines, indenturing Africans Calvinist Apartheid oppressed turned oppressor lowest common denominator of brutality And You carver-up of nations for perpetual advantage! Divided self’s divide-and-rule worldview Yes, you, dear you too were cleft within your soul viscerally cauterised much further back in time by Roman and by Norman yokes of robber barons lords of war and land that laid you low But still I sense your taproot yet to winnow from the karmic curse Winstanley’s Benjamin Zephaniah and Elizabeth Fry and George Monbiot
in the and even a Great Chain of
grooving with Jah people in their struggle, their desperation their elation and their elevation And did those feet on green and pleasant land? Of course they did! Aye … Sill writhing in the birth pangs of your great vocation See you,
Rocky Mountain Walk
The yellowed aspen flutters to the ground in rocky crag the eagle’s wing unfurls rowan berry splashes mountain red against the sky spider’s web awaits to catch a moment in your eye You who have no names for all the glories you behold no science or sharp analysis, nor levers of control I watch you linger gazing into limpid tumbling pool loving more than gold the fleeting gravel gathered there And did you hear, my love, the murmured word last night of Aborigines who dream the land and walk its way and say that White Man lies and walks with lies held out before his heart and this is why he talks his walk and talks and talks to such excess
Lithogenesis of Feminine
‘All is
lithogenesis’ - MacDiarmid She needs the space to form herself release gas bubbles from that molten lens plutonic settling into how She comes to pass traversing eons of Tardis time and slowly cooling stratifying differentiation and distinction uttered incarnate and wondrous is this process to behold and crystal is this tender gem And did you know that crystal structure plucks its strength not from pristine spotlessness but from minute impurities that interlock the lattice layers amongst the sparkling molecules an elemental fortitude out of adoption born? Ah! the ingenuity of being igneous this sister, mother, lover of the world no wonder wise men whisper in Her footsteps ‘holy – holy – holy’ knowing that there is no god but God Epiphany
I love the way you gather us beneath your wing of prayer I love the lightness rightness even the right-on-ness the way you pray the way that lovers do it spume of fiery lava melding merging spiritual tectonics … and do you know that I-just-tripped-out-on-your-eyes … the kindness lines that radiate around your eyes the light of God almighty Wifekissing you is like kissing a bed of flowers but this is what every bed of flowers has ever aspired to be
02/04/2021
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