Winter Visitors, Carluke
seagull in the
low green sunshine
here
on this high frosted ridge
so far
from skerries, trawlings, tides
the sky is clear, the nearest
weather banked away
beyond this ridge of high
another gull comes in
on the cold tail
end of a sickle of air
there’s a game to be played
ceremonial dance
and they cut
the shape of a new moon up
from the carpet of grass
into air, pure pale blue air
where the palest curve, as
thin as a pencilled line,
new moon, is
matched by a wing
being caught
in the late sun’s glow
they are light
they are light
in the last of the sun
then they turn
into shadow and slide
down an arc of hunger
to crawl for crusts
that schoolkids dropped
as the class, in a heated
room, trawls each
line of words for
sense, sensation, symbol
gull alights
on that patch of green
as gull, as gull, and
grooms a wing, and settles
into the darkening grass
About this poem
This poem was included in the Best of the Best Scottish Poems, published in 2019. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of our annual online anthology Best Scottish Poems, the Library invited broadcaster, journalist and author James Naughtie to edit a ‘Best of the Best’ drawn from each of the annual editions of Best Scottish Poems.
Editor’s comment:
Its simplicity gives this poem a bare dignity. Seagulls appear far from the sea in the Lanarkshire hills on a winter’s day, that’s all. But their wheels and arcs in the sky are enough to capture Aonghas MacNeacail’s imagination and stir his memories of home (‘skerries, trawlings, tides’). For a few moments he’s transported, and he takes us with him.
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2004. 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 2004 was Hamish Whyte.
Editor’s comment:
This is from his time as MacDiarmid Fellow at Brownsbank Cottage, a beautifully balanced piece (seagulls outside, schoolchildren inside) with nice repetitions (‘as gull, as gull’).
Author’s note:
Working with groups – of adults as well as young people – I like to set exercises which tap into one or both of two resources we can all, at whatever age, access – memory and observation. Where possible, when I have set the group to work, I try to follow my own example. This poem arose out of one such occasion.
The location was an English classroom in Carluke High School, where I have been a regular weekly visitor for several years now. I can’t remember what age-group I was working with, or anything of what they may have written. I know that my attention was caught by some movement outside the window, the detail of which forms the essential backbone of the poem.
It was, as I recall, latish winter (we don’t tend to get too many frosty days before January). The time was late afternoon. From a clear blue sky, some low sunlight still caught the treetops. Down below, the lawned school grounds divided between areas the sun hadn’t reached, where a thin veil of frost still lay, and the patch of fresh green where sunshine had rested. Beyond the painted school fence, rough ground, scrub and woodland were wrapped in winter gray. But there, on the green strip, a seagull stood squatly, being a gull, took off to meet another approaching gull, and behaved pretty much as the poem describes.
Returning to a poem some time after it’s been written is a curious experience. Memories, of course, played a part in its writing. Carluke is upland and inland, far from the littoral topography in which I grew up: ‘so far/ from skerries’ etc… Re-reading the words is also an act of reclamation of the moment, except that I see more in it than simple description, and try to remember the extent to which the process of finding words to express thoughts also revealed subtexts, including an elegaic thread that seems obvious to me now. And I don’t remember.
What I do remember is that warm room, head of department Eddie Poyner and his charges thinking their thoughts and I mine, intimations of dusk, the cold outside, and driving the 25 miles home with a poem taking shape in my mind, pulling in to the side of the road a couple of times to scribble a line or two.
I can’t pretend to know how a poem is put together. An image is found, a feeling, perhaps a rhythm, and you follow whatever track intuition takes you along, snatching this word, that phrase, from a whirl of impressions until, eventually, that ‘darkening grass’ seems a good place to stop. It’s that simple and that complicated. And you don’t really know. Until someone else says ‘I like it’. That’s all that’s needed. Then you know it can have a life of its own.