I’ve wanted to go to Scotland ever since I can remember. I’ve read book after book after book about it and its history and its famous people, and it draws me thither like a call from home. Sometimes I wonder if I lived there once or more, in another lifetime, or in a dream; that frisson of recognition in the descriptions and photographs of a place I’ve never been. Now that I’m soon to be going there, I worry somewhat that it won’t live up to my expectations, the anticipation of so many decades. However, deep down, I know I won’t be disappointed. The following 2 poems were written by Scottish poets, both contemporary ones, both women.<\/p>\n
The Creel
\nby Kathleen Jamie<\/b><\/p>\n
The world began with a woman,
\nshawl-happed, stooped under a creel,
\nwhose slow step you recognise
\nfrom troubled dreams. You feel <\/p>\n
obliged to help bear her burden
\nfrom hill or kelp-strewn shore,
\nbut she passes by unseeing
\nthirled to her private chore.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not sea-birds or peat she\u2019s carrying
\nnot fleece, nor the herring bright
\nbut her fear that if ever she put it down
\nthe world would go out like a light.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Small Female Skull
\nby Carol Ann Duffy<\/b><\/p>\n
With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.
\nWhat is it like? An ocarina? Blow in its eye.
\nIt cannot cry, holds its breath only as long as I exhale,
\nmildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,
\npress my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh.
\nFor some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my head
\nin my hands, appalled. It feels much lighter than I’d thought;
\nthe weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse,
\nbut with something else, as though it could levitate. Disturbing.
\nSo why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone,<\/p>\n
and take it to the mirror to ask for a gottle of geer?
\nI rinse it under the tap, watch dust run away, like sand
\nfrom a swimming cap, then dry it – firstborn – gently
\nwith a towel. I see the scar where I fell for sheer love
\ndown treacherous stairs, and read that shattering day like braille.<\/p>\n
Love, I murmur to my skull, then, louder, other grand words,
\nshouting the hollow nouns in a white-tiled room.
\nDownstairs they will think I have lost my mind. No. I only weep
\ninto these two holes here, or I’m grinning back at the joke, this is
\na friend of mine. See, I hold her face in trembling, passionate hands.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n