Mark Sealey
What merlins know
Where the heather
was printed on peat,
the peat
was spaded upon granite;
the granite
is pitted with three thousand rains.
Here firs
were rescued from the horizon,
the horizon
shouldered the sun and snow;
the snow
clamps gorse, tracks, nests and fieldmice;
fieldmice glut in March
in a fat circle for survival.
Once, devilish pickings here drove
keepers of Uist sheep
up, out and away of stone
homesteads,
from hamlets
faced with ice, and forced
to stand with arms blackened, high in harsh gusts
east - and signal, flailing, failing, for help.
Once pillars of gritty smoke staggered
eastwards from squat crofts’ ridges;
merlins settle shortly;
sickling, swaddled infants reached for
sisterly, brotherly warmth;
sneezed at wool wound into kerchiefs,
bound into hoods for them -
milk faces limped responsibly
into work. Brute-like. Back pain.
Greyness of ashes, wet ashes, their own.
Where the untinted, unheld boulders
knock and chock in February floods,
the floods
exhort the soil to defend itself,
the soil
strains and sighs in the cramp;
the cramp belittles itself by
losing its gnaw on new voles and fieldmice,
who scutter behind the ragged-rich boulders
in the North’s halflight
unwatched now;
unseen always;
even by the merlins
was printed on peat,
the peat
was spaded upon granite;
the granite
is pitted with three thousand rains.
Here firs
were rescued from the horizon,
the horizon
shouldered the sun and snow;
the snow
clamps gorse, tracks, nests and fieldmice;
fieldmice glut in March
in a fat circle for survival.
Once, devilish pickings here drove
keepers of Uist sheep
up, out and away of stone
homesteads,
from hamlets
faced with ice, and forced
to stand with arms blackened, high in harsh gusts
east - and signal, flailing, failing, for help.
Once pillars of gritty smoke staggered
eastwards from squat crofts’ ridges;
merlins settle shortly;
sickling, swaddled infants reached for
sisterly, brotherly warmth;
sneezed at wool wound into kerchiefs,
bound into hoods for them -
milk faces limped responsibly
into work. Brute-like. Back pain.
Greyness of ashes, wet ashes, their own.
Where the untinted, unheld boulders
knock and chock in February floods,
the floods
exhort the soil to defend itself,
the soil
strains and sighs in the cramp;
the cramp belittles itself by
losing its gnaw on new voles and fieldmice,
who scutter behind the ragged-rich boulders
in the North’s halflight
unwatched now;
unseen always;
even by the merlins
Page(s) 27
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