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Dingle Dell

W. N. Herbert

There is no passport to this country,
it exists as a quality of the language.

It has no landscape you can visit;
when I try to listen to its vistas

I don’t think of that round tower, though
only two exist in Scotland though

both are near me. There are figures on
an aunt’s old clock, cottars; Scots

as marketed to Scots in the last century:
these are too late. I seek something

between troughs, a green word dancing
like weed in a wave’s translucence,

a pane not smashed for an instance
through which the Dingle Dell of Brechin

sinks into the park like a giant’s grave
from which his bones have long since

walked on air. Into this hole in
the gums of the language I see a name

roll like a corpse into the plague pits:
Bella. Its is both my grandmothers’.

Beauty, resilient as girstle, reveals
itself: I see all of Scotland

rolling down and up on death’s yoyo.
There is no passport to this country.


W. N. Herbert

from Forked Tongue (Bloodaxe, 1994)

Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Tags:

Fife & Angus Scotland
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W. N. Herbertb.1961

A poet of great variety, equally at home in Scots and English, W.N. Herbert’s work draws from tradition and contemporary culture to create poems of humour, sentiment and ideas.
More about W. N. Herbert

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