The Lightkeeper’s Ghost, Eilean Mòr
He sings full beam –
clear to the Ocean of Storms and shoals
of stars from undersongs, shivering
constellations – lythe, saithe and sandeel.
In the small hours inner reflections turn
with the mirrored lens, gannets splinter,
glance off waves of prismatic glass.
His psalmody voices sway and swell,
the guillemot’s tremulous hi riri o,
his tongue is silvered, shattered surf,
coruscating puirt à beul.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2023. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor for 2023 was Aoife Lyall.
Editor’s Comments:
Different languages and terminologies crash and splice together here like intersecting waves. It is easy for metaphors such as these to become heavy handed, but here they are skilfully woven “shoals / of stars”, and “Shivering constellations”. Dawson recognises how easily our thoughts and actions fall into the rhythm of the world we find ourselves in, how our “inner reflections turn / with the mirrored lens”.
This a poem as much about sound as it is about the sea: about knowing that there is still something in the echo of ourselves worth hearing.
Author’s Comments:
As sometimes happens, the seed of the poem was a dream – the lightkeeper was pacing around the top of the tower and from his wide-open mouth came a beam of light/song. I had happened upon a recording of Gaelic psalm singing and it seemed to me like the waves of the sea given human voice. This surely would be the song of a lightkeeper’s ghost – sea waves, sea birds, surf. A voice trying to manifest itself in natural music.
- Eilean Mòr — Gaelic: Big Island. Home to the Flannan Isles Lighthouse. In 1900, its lightkeepers were believed to have been swept away by a tremendous wave.
- Ocean of Storms — The only ‘ocean’ on the moon.
- lythe, saithe and sandeel — Species of fish found in Scottish waters.
- hi riri o — A refrain from a Gaelic song.
- puirt à beul — Gaelic: mouth music. A song to accompany dancing in the absence of instruments.
