Katrina Porteous

FOULA, AULD YULE
6th January

Shut the door and pass the bottle
Round the circle of light.
One by one let us drink to the days
The sun makes ripe,

And join in your riddle, Aggie Jean, in the ring
Of the stove’s peat reek,
While, long past midnight, the child in my lap is falling
Into sleep;

Into widening circles of sleep, that will carry her
Who knows where.
Let us drink to the fire within. We know too well
The dark out there.

From: 100 Island Poems, ed. James Knox Whittet (Iron Press 2005)

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DECOMMISSIONING

They are burning a boat on the beach.
Grim-backed, they watch
In a darkness that crackles with fear.

Their faces leap up through the flames,
Masks hacked out of wood,
Reeling, red as blood,
Round the funeral pyre on the sand.

The planks sunder and peel
Like the great black ribs of a whale.
Unclenched, they fall,

And the sparks stream away on the wind,
And they sting like spray, smart
Like the ice-driven spray of winter
That burns in the dark –

An ache they would understand
And suffer more easily
Than the small white scrap of paper

Whose vacancy
Tells what the landsman knows
Of a boat and its burden.
Charlie, Jack, Stephen:

They slip away through the smoke,
So many nails wrenched free,
Unfastened from the sea.

From: The Lost Music (Bloodaxe Books 1996)

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Excerpt from: TWEED

On the scarred hill, a house with no road.
The burn cuts the brae as an axe pares wood.
The shepherd of Earlshaugh in his tacketty boots
Has set out over the hill without a word.

Dense walls of forest have enfolded him;
Dark crowds of promises. He is swallowed up
With the thieves’ road, the Roman road, the iron-age scatterings.
The black trees bleed the valley, drop by drop.

Small mutterings. The restlessness of water. Nothing certain
But its movement and the earth’s response. The Powskein; the Corr.
The hills hold the memory of ice and rain. Each hollow
Deepens by the year,

Until there is no house, no road, no miles of forest,
Only the whispering roads of water. Oily, black,
Oozing from mud, glaur, rashers, Tweed begins to murmur:
Never look back.

From: Tweed Rivers, ed. Ken Cockburn and James Carter (Luath Press 2005)

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Excerpt from: THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Butter and eggs kept the house
And the wool paid the rent.
So we were warmed and fed
When pay was scant.

How many lambings passed
Since a bairn hungered?
Scarcely a living soul
Left who remembers.

And now the sheep worth nowt,
And the house to sell.
A hand that’s never lambed a yowe
On Grindon Fell,

That’s never once led muck from the byre
Or milked a cow,
Mouths from his soft armchair: ‘Them things
Don’t matter now.’

From Hoond Hill to High Shields,
From Hotbank to Hoosesteeds,
From Cuddy’s Craig to Clew Hill,
Aal the way to Sooin’ Shields.

The jagged scrapyard of hawthorn,
A rush of wind in its hooks,
Berries ablaze like a lantern,
A robin among its roots:

The sons of ancient hedges
Bow to the east. Below,
Sky pools in the vallum.
The fields of the south glow,

Burnished copper. The north
Is verdigris and rust.
The wind harrows the silent
Lough. Violent, possessed,

Unpossessable country;
It stretches away
Into the distance, free-fall.
The rowan clings to the scree.

Neither England nor Scotland,
Itself alone:
Acres of secrets. Mouths
Stopped with a rubble of stones.

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BORDERERS

Wool on the whin’s barb marks the track.

The violence of molten rock
Stretches before you like the sea.

From Eildon’s summit you look out
On frozen time. For miles, the black

Impenetrable, speechless hills
Of Liddesdale and Teviotdale,

Redesdale, Coquetdale, North Tyne –
Rucked and buckled, patched with pine,

Cold, embattled, acid-green
Moorland, blackland, carved between
Floes of ice and tides of men,

Fastnesses of bracken, slopes
And gullies – fold their secrets close,

While the searchlight of the sun
Sweeps across them, one by one.

Three things have no end:
Fear, hunger and the wind.

They blast the open heathland where
A single strand of wire runs.
Such a fine thread holds the peace.

Bold, defiant in the east,
At Sweethope Crag, a tower bursts
Out of bare rock, a brandished fist,

The only still, straight edge in sight.
While ragged flags of cloud and light

Tear like promises, it keeps
Its stony word upon the hill,

Unmoved, untouched, unblinking eye –
Outstares the armies of the sky,
Time its only enemy.

Yarrow Water, Ettrick, Tweed:
A ruckle of stones and a nettle-bed,

Grey-boned hawthorn, flecked with blood,
Almost turned itself to stone,

Lichened trunk and strangled root –
Braid their shadows by the burn

In the places they belong.
Stone and tree-root: make us strong

Where the wind blows on the fell,
Where the track runs up the hill.

Who cares where you came from now?
Every ditch and fold and knowe

And the white grass that swallows down
Arrow-head and carved stone,

Becomes a place to watch and hide.
The wide land bristles, sharp with eyes.

*

Where Tweed and Teviot’s waters meet,
They carry all away: the gates,

The fences, signposts. Pinetrees sway
Like ships at mooring on their slopes.

Tree-root, picket, branch, black loam –
The flood unfastens all; its broom

Sweeps the living and the dead
Towards a place that has no borders.

South and north, the colours drain
From drowned fields as night falls

On far, unfathomable hills
That sink their differences in sleep;

One ocean, darkening. Who knows
Where the fence runs on the fell?

The fading light, equivocal
As quicksilver, the cloud, the rain
The water singing in its veins,

Leave the earth to dark and wind.

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