|
i.m. Sorley MacLean 1911-96
A cloister below
the Cheviot Hills
once sheltered lepers
but the
Church dissolved
and the lepers died.
All over Northern Europe
the
helpless died.
The cloister reared up
on end, against raiders,
then sank to a
farmstead.
Murrays were in it
but poverty blew us
out of
peasanthood
towards the Antipodes.
To no part of Europe
is our country antipodal:
its counter-foot
is
the mid-Atlantic.
Where the great Gaelic poet
has gone, that's Antipodes,
Antipodes to
everywhere.
Horror to the fortunate,
to the helpless, harbour:
death
makes us all emigrants.
I pray where he is
excels modern doctrine
as his lines left on
earth
out-glory his Spain.
I mourn, MacGillEain,
that my sleep under scalpels
meant I missed
reading with you.
Now turning your pages
will be as if I riffled
the
Northern Lights
and heard their language.
Les
Murray
Back to Contents | 
