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The Night Watch

Niall Campbell

It’s 1 a.m. and someone’s knocking
at sleep’s old, battered door – and who
could it be but this boy I love,
calling for me to come out, into
the buckthorn field of being awake –

and so I go, finding him there
no longer talking – but now crying
and crying, wanting to be held;
but shhh, what did you want to show
that couldn’t wait until the morning?

Was it the moon – because I see it:
the first good bead on a one-bead string;
was it the quiet – because I owned it,
once – but found I wanted more. 


Niall Campbell

From Noctuary (Bloodaxe, 2019)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

childhood children fatherhood fathers sleeping the moon tiredness

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2019. 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 in 2019 was Roseanne Watt.

Editor’s note:

Noctuary, Niall Campbell’s second collection with Bloodaxe Books, is a word which means ‘a diary of the night’, and here we witness Campbell’s fluency in that strange language of the small hours, a lexicon which many new parents are familiar with. Campbell’s carefully-crafted lyricism acquires the tender quality of a lullaby in this poem, seeming to occupy a place somewhere at the edge of dreaming and rising, that ‘buckthorn field of being awake’.

Author’s note:

New parenthood is a strange dream. Everything exists in a haze of tiredness and emotion. The kettle is always boiling. This poem was written in that first stretch of parenthood – the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award had allowed me to leave work and immerse myself in this new way of life. It’s not a life that allows the most time for actually writing – but somehow some poems were written. Micro-sleeps, washings, tiny vests on the heater. Every memory of that period seems to take place at night-time. The world was a series of dreams and waking-ups – and on top of this a new emotional life was beginning.

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Best Scottish Poems 2019

edited by Roseanne Watt
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Niall Campbell

Niall Campbell is a Scottish poet originally from South Uist in the Western Isles. His first collection was the inaugural winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize.
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