I really should be out fishing tonight but I have had a hard day so I'm currently relaxing with an Islay malt and a book by one of my favourite Scottish poets , Norman McCaig. I thought I would share this poem by him entitled , So Many Summers. Whenever I read this poem it reminds me of scene I encountered on my fishing trip to the Isle of Lewis last year. It's funny how the words and thoughts of another man's mind can conjure up images in ones own mind even though his original thoughts have no connection with mine. I suppose that's the essence of poetry.
Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.
I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.
Time adds one malice to another one -
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.
No comments:
Post a Comment