Salmo Salar

The Moon lying large
Its milky disc of light
Drawing down
Into the blush of dawn
Its last beams crossing
Shallow bends of the Tay
Into the shadow of Schiehallion

Somehow a cold sun
Rises without noise,
Pomp or ceremony
Glinting from surface ice
Swelling with the
Hidden waters writhing
Below, unknowing the night

And, caught in an unlit pool
An eye looks up
Salmo Salar,
Lying in wait
Patient to kill, to spawn
Encased in ice
Not yet undone

The journey home
Like the prodigal
Its ungrateful sins washed
In the oceans
And here, bedraggled
Wounded, and glorious
Lies Scotland, unfinished

This is no grave
This spawning ground
So easily misunderstood
This place of death
This tomb, a womb…
My eyes met her eye
I looked away

© John Stevens

The Ceilidh House

The peat fire crackles and burns with stories;
footsteps scurry through mist and mountain
to warm a Hebridean hearth with stories.

A figure crosses turf where St Columba
knelt long ago beside the Snizort;
the crofter’s creel is laden with stories.

He pauses to watch the snow-stars drifting
on the loch, with its kelp and pebbles;
hares in the lazy-bed leap with stories.

The crofter enters his neighbour’s parlour,
rests on the settle while divots smoulder;
a plaintive skirl fills the room with stories.

Shadows dance round the doleful piper,
whose music makes the embers tremble;
the single oil lamp flickers with stories.

A mother stirs her three-legged cauldron;
sisters spin, or weave at the handloom,
infusing a homemade plaid with stories.

Hailstone tears pound the snow-flecked Cuillin,
recalling the Clearances, emigration:
the Ceilidh House overflows with stories.

© Caroline Gill

www.carolinegillpoetry.com

From: Driftwood by Starlight (The Seventh Quarry Press, 2021)

Caroline’s MacDonald grandfather and great-grandfather were born in Sydney. Her 3x great-grandfather had been a shepherd crofter in the Highlands. The poem was written after visits to the Skye Museum of Island Life and the Clan Donald Archives in Armadale. The poem is a Tercet Ghazal, a form developed by Robert Bly (d.2021) from the traditional Persian Ghazal, a complex form written in couplets and involving a pattern of refrain- and rhyme-words