The Winds of Fethaland

Fethaland is far from here:

We took the long road
From the sea-free net savvy middle-lands
The the furthest point
Of what there they call the Main Land.

Spelling each other on the weird ways
Of the modern road system
To a welcome from friend-strangers:
A homely house in grey-green Glasgow.

& on, on to The Flower of Scotland
The granite grey ford-town
Where big boats with cranes
Waited in the harbour for their summons to the sea-fields.

Fields to be ploughed on our behalf
By M.V Hjaltland to Shetland
Through the guillemot’s kitchen
Our fellow travelers, fulmars.

While beneath us, unseen
We passed the black muds that will
Some day be shining stones
On a distant, future shore.

Through the undark night
We passed peaceful Fair Isle
Saw, in a sleepy simmer-dim
Dark cliffs, a lit house, through window glass.

Morning & into the muddy bay of the Sword Hilt Isle
A land of fiddle players & sheep
Otter-people, skua-people, red throated diver-people,
More Norse than Scot, Sea-People.

Up shag haunted voe & merlin haunted moor
A winding road, a long road
The last road, to the final station, with
Winter’s peewits & dunlin already arriving.

This is not a path followed
By many footfalls in these fast days
But we delight in rocky shores
& their inhabitants, past & present.

Those lonely hills of sedge-heather
Were once pleasant pasture
& the small round stone houses
Of the ancient people may still be seen.

They lived well here in their time
With good grain, kale & kine
But even older secrets & wonders
Pass beneath our feet.

From the polished Dalriadan moine
We hike over onto the glooming basement
The dark, blocky castles & spires
Of mythical, primal, pre-cambrianity.

The view from Raven’s window:
Black framed, mad-jagged
By beserker storm waves of The Western Sea
A view of emptiness all the way to the North Pole.

That’s not a place where Raven wants to go
For that is the land of death
& he loves life & in their own way
He & his wife celebrate its richness.

So we reached the last bastion of our journey
From Mercia to the High Lands, Isle Lands
& beyond, believing that we can’t get much further
From the ugliness, waste & hubris left behind us.

But even here, the piratic bonxie, the curlew
The kittiwake & the common-as-muck
Not so common, common gull
Could soon be gone from these plastic speckled shores.

& even here that the ever-so smart signals
Of the self-conscious otherworld
Still illuminate the screen tells all
Or would, because I switched it off.

No GPS map, no texts or trendy kennings
From the country of the meme-people,
We are alone with the power of this place
& it is more real than they are.

& we are neither lost nor last, nor can we ever be
Like the tern or the turnstone
We can find our way in this world
& it has lead us here, to the fat winds of Fethaland.

 

Note:
I have used kennings based on the origin of place names throughout the poem. eg. Shetland= Hjaltland=Sword Hilt Land; Glasgow=grey-green; Fethaland=Fat-Land.

Night Jar

 

 

Nightjar! Oh night jar!
We drank from the shadowy bottle of your light
Glass chink the last alarm call
Of some small bird by the path,
As Nightjar, oh night jar,
Your mothy cloak of
Of wing-clap wander-gloom
Spread over the deeping wood.
Three old friends & a younger person;
From the Queen, whom
They call The Major these days;
Past Medusa’s broken crown
& the Central Oak,
Taking care not to step on glow-worms;
Nightjar, oh night jar,
From out the forest we came!
Out onto the owl & pipit
Haunted common, to hear your
Croaking riffym rhythms!
Gloaming made visible;
Primal, primary, pre-human,
Praeternatural, preyventionally obscure,
A whirling, whirring, whiling for a whist
Among the birches, pines, gorse & heather.
Oh yes,
& the cuckoos were up late too.

A great evening in Sherwood Forest & on Budby Heath with friends, human & other than human. Riffym is a word coined by my friend Leanne Bridgwater which means an improvised rhythm. See her posthumous book, adDictionary, for more of the same. Preyventionally is a word I made up; I think it makes sense. Gratitude to my companions.

Wroth Silver 2022: The End of an Era

 

The End of An Era

Was that the last swallow of summer?
First frost on the car this morning?
Crisp peppery leaves line the track to the wood,
The robin wakes up to song again,
Young starlings gather & chatter,
The nights draw in.

The year is like a wave
That builds & crests & breaks & falls;
We all feel it & this is history
Her story, our story, the end of an era:
The Elizabethan Age
Of never having had it so good.

You don’t need me to tell you
That the white heat of the sonic boom
Of modernism
Will always come up against this:
Time versus the timelessness of the cycle,
Whilst the words we use each day
Would baffle a person from the fifties.

Even more so the people of the land
In whose footsteps we walked today;
Who saw war, famine & disease
Come & go, just as we have. & here we are
Stood around our stone before dawn
Where, year on year
The wave of history itself breaks for us.

So we, whatever the world may say or do,
Whatever change may come
Are gathered in our meeting place once again:
To pay the Duke his due
& toast the Monarch’s health
Year upon year, age upon age.

The land bears witness to their & our travails
For Sovereignty will always take on form.
Mother, father, son & heir:
May he & all his people
Be blessed, protected & guided by the ancestral wisdom
Which draws us back to Knightlow.
God save the King!

This was my ninth year as the poet laureate of Wroth Silver with the performance of my work at the Wroth Silver Breakfast, held for some years now at the Queen's Head in Bretford. My thanks & respect, as ever go to the guardians of this ancient local tradition, William Waddilove & David Eadon; the latter having attended the ceremony for the 85th time this year.

The title of my poem, The End of an Era, is now doubly poignant as since we saw him last week, David Eadon who has organised things since the 1960s has announced that he will no longer be attending for  health reasons. Thank you David, for all your years of dedication!

When I  refer to sovereignty I mean that which is most noble & most able to serve within us all, not merely a state of aristocratic privilege.

To read my previous Wroth Silver poems & find out more about this unique & ancient event follow these links:
http://www.wrothsilver.org.uk/
2014: Martinmas
2015: The Road of Time
2016: Wheel of the Year, Wheel of the Land
2017: Eight Decades
2018: Ghosts
2019: Throw a Penny in the Hollow of the Stone 
2020-21 Dear Ancestors

The Wroth Silver Breakfast in the 1920s