A verse letter to Allan Ronald
Leaves, I've been turning leaves, old friend,
for these last days, searching for a way.
As I read your ‘Tornahaish’,
first verses on your homecoming,
I hear Heaney's soft vowel music -
‘Anahorish’ - your own tuned ‘Hallaig’,
I hear your loved Scots makars,
MacLean, Mackay Brown, MacCaig,
complete a circle in your heron
out of memory, turning in the still sky
over the burn at Tornahaish.
Last week at a bend on the West Looe River,
fallen freshly silent, as your ears,
after a cacophony of schoolchildren
learning to canoe, we ate our bread
and cheese watching a nesting egret
snow white as a marble statue,
erect and sentinel at the water's head.
Then slow, so slow, like an old warplane,
a grey heron rose from the edge of sight
and beat out its old languid rhythm
across the afternoon sky.
It is how we must recall,
never in rush or hurry,
but left before an old well
of icy silence, so deep we fear
the cast stone's fall, as if
without end, before the splash -
affirming something,
once more from which to drink.
So it must be then,
to see the heron again
we must risk the cold,
the fall, as if to nothingness,
before the bird rises again,
frozen at the stillest point,
akin to ends and beginnings,
and I feel your all too human pain
mixed with returning joy: the well
is the spring's out, drink we must.
It is how we must recall,
never in rush or hurry,
but left before an old well
of icy silence, so deep we fear
the cast stone's fall, as if
without end, before the splash -
affirming something,
once more from which to drink.
So it must be then,
to see the heron again
we must risk the cold,
the fall, as if to nothingness,
before the bird rises again,
frozen at the stillest point,
akin to ends and beginnings,
and I feel your all too human pain
mixed with returning joy: the well
is the spring's out, drink we must.
Page(s) 26
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