Before David and I left for our walking trip to the Outer Hebrides, we watched Owen Shears' wonderful series on British Poets. One of the poets featured in the series was the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown.
I so loved his poem HAMNAVOE, that I decided to memorise it while on holiday. I now know if 'off by heart' and thoroughly enjoy sharing my party piece with family and friends. It's a poem which remembers George's father John Brown who was a postman in Hamnavoe (the Viking name for Stromness). I love the way each image prepares the way for the next image. For example when morning breaks on "the salt and tar steps", we are taken to where the fishing boats are heading off to their 'cold horizons'. AND...isn't the 'buttered bannock of the moon' a wonderful, wonderful description? The poem describes John Brown's day as he delivers his mail and the happenings that go on in the town. It reminds me a bit of Under Milkwood as a day unfolds and closes. Apparently most children in Stromness memorise this poem. Good old Scottish education. Here's the poem:
My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke
On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide
And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.
Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.
A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of corn-stalks and milk.
In the Arctic Whaler three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.
The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher-girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring.
And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.
The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.
He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
my seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;
And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.
