I've known this for a while. But today got official confirmation.
He asked me to read him a poem. I don't know why. Maybe he remembers I was a poet once. Maybe he just wanted to 'rinse his mouth out with a line of verse.'
So I read him Hallaig, by Sorley McLean
I had the great pleasure of hearing Sorley reading Hallaig, among other poems, in Edinburgh at the Queen's Hall in the 1990s. Shortly before McLean's own death.
He read it in #Ghaidhlig then English. I was struck by how resonant it was in a language I didn't understand – how the intonations reflected the landscape. the ocean, the rhythm and rock
It was sonorous and rolling, a cadence I had not heard before.
But it made a beautiful sound, and even though I did not understand the words the *sound* of the words made sense. It was a song.
And then he read his own English translation.
(I won't go in to the whole thing about the attempted eradication of Gaelic culture post 1745 here, it's too tedious and I am far, far too tired.)
Anyway. Here is the poem I read to my dad when he asked me to read me a poem.
I am typing this from memory. My Memory is pretty good.It may not be perfect.
Also bear in mind that McLean was writing this within living memory of the Clearances, but also in the shadow of Fascism arising ing the 1930s.
Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig
There's a board nailed across the window
I looked through to see the west
And my love is a birch forever
By Hallaig Stream, at her tryst
Between Inver and Milk Hollow,
somewhere around Baile-chuirn,
A flickering birch, a hazel,
A trim, straight sapling rowan.
In Screapadal, where my people
Hail from, the seed and breed
Of Hector Mor and Norman
By the banks of the stream are a wood.
To-night the pine-cocks crowing
On Cnoc an Ra, there above,
And the trees standing tall in moonlight -
They are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birches to move,
The wood to come up past the cairn
Until it has veiled the mountain
Down from Beinn na Lice in shade.
If it doesn't, I'll go to Hallaig,
To the sabbath of the dead,
Down to where each departed
Generation has gathered.
Hallaig is where they survive,
All the MacLeans and MacLeads
Who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
The dead have been seen alive,
The men at their length on the grass
At the gable of every house,
The girls a wood of birch trees
Standing tall, with their heads bowed.
Between The Leac and Fearns
The road is plush with moss
And the girls in a noiseless procession
Going to Clachan as always
And coming boack from Clachan
And Suisnish, their land of the living,
Still lightsome and unheartbroken,
Their stories only beginning.
From Fearns Burn to the raised beach
Showing clear in the shrouded hills
There are only girls congregating,
Endlessly walking along
Back through the gloaming to Hallaig
Through the vivid speechless air,
Pouring down the steep slopes,
Their laughter misting my ear
And their beauty a glaze on my heart.
Then as the kyles go dim
And the sun sets behind Dun Cana
Love's loaded gun will take aim.
It will bring down the lightheaded deer
As he sniffs the grass round the wallsteads
And his eye will freeze: while I live,
His blood won't be traced in the woods.
@scotlit I'm sure I will have got some of this wrong,
It's been a long day.
@iamdavidobrien I’m sorry to hear about your father; I hope he enjoyed the poem.
My own father died quite suddenly. I found this poem, “To Alexander Graham”, by W.S. Graham, to be a comfort.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48732/to-alexander-graham
Thank you.
David O'Brien
Assoc for Scottish Literature