Dingle Dell Poem by WN 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.