Looking For Scotland Poem by Sally Evans

This rolling field
waves brown over the bright
hedges. Her colander
burned with the fruit,
gooseberries, a few red,
to give a green jam
mixed with elderflower.
Brunton Turret
was not far away.
The white and brimming miles
of Roman Wall,
the North Tyne river.
How far away?
A mere ten years,
yet in those ten
how many muses
came and died?
Putting sugar to fruit
she still walks strong,
though her friends perished
and her friends' loves have gone.
She left the slopes
of black-ripe legend
for the feared country
it barred out.
Her friends' muses perished,
year upon year of jam
scattered with elder florets
were consumed like rhyme,
yet the memory of it
fell like fruit in time,
like bushand hedgerow fruit
she rolled, rich as the past,
rich as what perishes
into the bladed field
and does not come again,
no, does not come again
until the earth is worked
and stores of song may spring.

[How nearly Northumberland was finding Scotland]

I found Plashetts
ripe for rehousing along the railway,
birches and penny-buns
choice and inviting on the old alignment,
embankments and cuttings
water cowslips, water milkmaids,
ghosts of old waterlogged steam-routes.

I found Birdoswald,
Wark and Warden,
I followed the North Tyne, frozen
walked up its hidden valley
snowscape with warm red wine,
and in the summer, redcurrants, gooseberries
to re-stock country wine.

I wandered in the wilds of Northumberland
looking for somewhere - Scotland I did not find,
not then. I found Powburn
a wide ring of suede-coloured champignons
keeping the shorn grass magic
for hundreds of years,
high air, lichens undisturbed
by man in van,
water, a shepherd's crook
small grey houses, an ancient look.

I found Kielder
filled with foresters' cottages
with children who never spoke to strangers
because there weren't any strangers,
Kielder high above a projected dam.
Kielder viaduct its feet in the dam
and higher, a Dangerous Field
adders bred.

I looked towards Corbridge,
and I saw a field of archaeologists
annual amongst the buttercups,
golden swaying grasses,
friendly brown soil and stones.

Stay inland, whispered the grass,
waving in the summer breeze,
do notgo downvalley past Corbridge,
on the the Tyne for real, real coasters,
tall masted ships asail
through the jaws of the Tyne
to the harsh seas of the North,
the dull East English coastline,
Hartlepool, Hull, London.

Wait awhile, said the archaeologists,
and listen to our tale.
We have a direct line to the past
in the buildings and stones,
magic of things that were used by savages!
I am looking for Scotland, I said,
have you a line to Scotland?
and I left them with many backward glances:
they looked so happy,
digging up graves, undoing time's ravages.

How could I know my search was for Scotland?
It must have been a search for where I came to.
How different from Northamptonshire
elm hedges thick with cow parsley and honey-
suckle and cousins in New Zealand and Australia?
The shoe-batterers did quite well for themsleves
making Northamptonshire rich, yet the villages
at two-mile intervals reminded me
of those in County Durham.

In Newcastle I met
Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDairmid
propping each other up
on the student society steps,
blind drunk on their way to the Poetry.
In those days you could drink and drive a point
as the young poets posed with you ng girls
practising posing as women
and the old poets posed with their adversaries
or plain posed.

Scotland is not that way, I said,
coming back form Northumberland
a hundredth time. Northumberland
is too like nowhere else to be near Scotland.

We took buses to Lindisfarne,
also got drunk, singing
O Sir Jasper and the Foggy Foggy dew
stuck over on the tides
too drunk to find the sea,
too drunk to be let loose on the causeway
but perfect for walking the broad seaward beach
of raised pebbles, the dunes
of lark and orchid,
on the regionless spur of land
lagooning northward.

[How nearly the North was finding Scotland]

The Lake District
I did not come back from
forever beguiled by a magnet
strengthened at Penrith, encouraging
Keswick and Kendal, Ambleside
and southerly Kirkby Lonsdale.
At last the land spoke with the sky,
clouds slid down screes,
waters rose among meadows,
and the land, never meant to be flat,
bent and created the sky dome
and the Lake Dsitrict
was ever mroe a home.

But I had not yet foudn Scotland.
I went to the York Mystery Plays
in the good old days, sat on a platform
in a silk dress and watched pageants,
the whole of York being one;
I wrote in the public library
and in the massive museums
alone among fans and invitations,
alone among engines and inventions
performances and supplications.

[How nearly Wales was finding Scotland]

I went to Wales
and there I nearly found Scotland.
there I found mountains, tarns
forests and philosophies,
a lisping church and raging languages.
The hills spoke, the rivers sang,
the birds appointed arch druids,
seas were everywhere, roads ran nowhere
(but mostly through Machynlleth)
and the threatening state of Blaenau Ffestiniog
and the threatening coal under the valleys
and the threatening Atlantic waves
bashing the beaches and shattering seashells
where a small boat sneaks out for lobsters
and comes back with eels -
so nearly was Wales finding Scotland.

So nearly was Wales finding Scotland
that, up a slope of forest trees
over a tumbling watercourse
where squirrels hopped, a charcoal hut,
a river from which the distant hills
blue as the spiked Snowdon horseshoe
that might have been Cuillin
fooled me into thinking I was there,
& though a boy swam across a lake with me
it was places I loved, by which I was haunted,
places with which I wanted
to have the ultimate affair.

Not a night on a village hillside,
a castellated fortress above a grape plain
poplared like north Italy,
nor a stretch of cold emmpty Venice Lido beach
nor a lush hunting forest in france,
filled with edible smails and freize du bois
and hot plants with stinking hairy names
nor a desert sandscape further south
fanilair from television's pushy knowledge,
nor the vast continent the desert crowns
seen through a thousand travel books and novels.

Because yes, I did find Scotland at last,
I have to inform you, to place my bony hand
on your shoulder or luggage, or drinks-tray
and make you listen, in the English
that is only perfectible here
or in other delectable country in the palm of a hand,
a pool in the palm, fingers for ridges
capable of grasping a mottled sky,
a clear blue nigt-sky, or a black day-sky
under emotion's eclipse, a land
that can beckon sky, spill sky,
point, lift or delineate sky
or push firmly through sky like a tissue
pasted on a hoop,
to reality blinking in its self-begotten light

1996