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Mairi MacInnes

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Rain

The rain hasn't let up all day. It's weather
more typical of the Westem Isles
than this town in England where I live.
We read in the paper today of bombs in London
and an innocent foreigner shot dead by the police,
but the rain brings to mind an old man of Skye
who stood before a commission in Isleornsay
some time in the eighteen eighties
and bore witness at last to his rotten century.

'They were carried away in spite of themselves.
If alone, a woman might be taken off the field
where she was weeding the crop,
or a man off the shore where he was fishing
or even snatched sleeping in bed.
I t was a mystery where they went.
Years passed before any of them came back,
from the Carolinas, mostly. They'd changed,
so changed that no one knew who they were,
enslaved as they'd been, and aged.
Then, when all was revealed,
judge what we thought of ourselves,
left behind as we were, and useless!
This was within my father's lifetime,'
said the old man, glad the commissioners were listening.
 
Vicious, those events. Vicious, the indignation
with which we look back, since we can only wonder
about the suffering and the lives they led.
Vicious our own not very different century,
the past still present as the past to us,
the present present as an appalling past to come.

Page(s) 16

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