Arriving on Time
I am on a train.
Today is a very important day.
I have an interview today, and the journey to this meeting has taken years. It feels like arriving.
I was looking out of the window thinking about A Scots Quair, comprising Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, one of my favourite books. I have related to it differently as I have aged, and it is one I will always recommend.
The principal character, Chris Guthrie, is buffeted by life and disconnected from her body, torn in part by duty and love. Grief is woven into the character of the people and place of Northeast Scotland as a fact to be acknowledged and unexplored. It is the ending of Grey Granite where the reckoning of a lifetime of living quietly visits her, and they talk, woman to emotion.
The turned soil is the colour, the exact colour, that Lewis Grassic Gibbon describes, and I wonder if he held the soil in his hands, rubbing the texture between his fingers and feeling the history. I have done that myself, crouched on knees older than me, planning the year’s planting from the texture of the soil and looking to the trees in the hope of advice.
I am drawn to Chris’s passion for teaching and learning, and to the way the men, the land and the people scour against it. At the end, after all the sacrifice, love, loss, pain, injustice and compromise, she is left without anyone wanting or needing anything from her, or asking her what she needs. It is the end of being useful in a world where unseen labour carries the weight of men’s work.
I think he was writing about his mother. He wrote with such compassion and honesty, and I feel the love in his description of her.
The train arrives in Dundee soon, and I need to pay homage to younger me with a visit to the fabulous Fisher and Donaldson for a pie and a finnie.
I thought this poem from my upcoming publication, Constellations, was appropriate.
Origami
The reflective waypoint holds my gaze,
I trace my personhood, stage by stage,
From the child to the woman,
And the folds that pressed me into
shape.
The colours bleed softly into the folds,
The bright hope of youth to the aura of gold
With veins of life lived woven
into the thread,
And I remain within the narrative weave.
