Out of the Clyde
Since all your steps were taken,
and you’d set off for death,
with your hobnails on Ben Narnain
walking the kyleside shingle;
since you knew since you were little that
you’d return to this young life in death –
to the ship’s cradles, the Greenock hills,
the high tenement, your mother’s voice,
your father singing, Alastair’s homing memory –
you came calmly, puffing light on the page,
to speak for the other side (like an Airlie or a Reid)
fine-tuning your small self, the one you grieved
all your life. Clydeside clad, you stepped with ease,
not minding yourself on the way, a steady pace, then
stopped – out of the flood – to speak to us, first
from the tall tenement of poetry, then off on a ship
down the upper Clyde, and onto a steamer on
the Firth of Forth, you carried us, Makar W.S.
– your light lit, your heart light –
all the way down to the love-signed sea,
still William Sydney who married Agnes Nessie,
then you stood stock still to listen
to your father singing the Bonny Earl o’ Moray;
a boy once more who learnt the lessons early –
that those who hurt you most, you love most dearly.
About this poem
This poem was written as part of ‘The Blue Crevasse’ project, which marks the centenary of W.S. Graham in 2018. The image of a blue crevasse famously appears in W.S. Graham’s poem ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’, and the author’s estate welcomed the idea of creating a similar metaphorical space where admirers of the poet might, in a sense, be lowered for a month’s solitary ‘residency’.
