Port

Island waters: seas, lochs

Streams, waterfalls

The poet’s father’s daughter

Plays the pipes and all

All to have a calling from

The birth date to the wake

Words that stall, fall short

Of deep within rhythms

Of the oceans & of

Those seven deadly sins

Sunlight on the ferry

As for the boys in France

Back to making merry

Lead the nearly men a dance

Tall ships and seaborne warriors

Divers for the crab and the clam

Hear the anthems of the Highlands

Fire the fear and then be damned

Dream of wide open moorland

Sleep on thoughts of mountain tan

Lay down old preoccupations

As you would in far away Japan

With the author and the hari-kari

Turn the pages on the love that ran

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Rain And Sun And Rain And Sun And: Love Of Seedlings In Flight

Transmission

Past Benbecula airstrip

My mind trips into the past

Your lasting impressions

Stress the importance of

The concordance of memory

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Rain And Sun And Rain And Sun And: Love Of Seedlings In Flight

Volbeda

He paints from memory

He walks across the machair

Out to the still or raging seas

On to the living sands

Back in his studio he lets

The canvas carry his load

He works from memory

The depths of his distant

Unconscious are ravaged

Whilst his present mood

Reflects in the surface

Tension of the painting

These will be original

Works from memory

For as Jac says ‘he is

A professional artist

He is a painter

Not a printmaker’

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Rain And Sun And Rain And Sun And: Love Of Seedlings In Flight

Young Man

Restless soul

Rips at his cigarette

His thin artist legs

Carried quick in red plimsolls

As he skips

Across the decking

On to the seaweed-strewn rocks

By the loch side

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Reclamation Yards

Past the broken down tractors

Past the randomly discarded farm implements

Over the heather moor and the peat bog

Past the rebuilt black houses

Past the new self-build houses

With abandoned caravans

The islanders you would think

Are not fond on aesthetic beauty. 

Perhaps this is what a hard life brings

Years of cutting peat or catching fish

Years of toil before this current time

Of holiday housing the leisured classes

Perhaps these years of hardship

Coupled with the regular visits

Of mist and rain combine

To build an island consciousness

Where survival and shelter comes first

A, bloody well, long way first

This is not a place for you seekers

Of the peak
Of the self realisation pyramid

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Rain And Sun And Rain And Sun And: Love Of Seedlings In Flight