by Ken Cockburn

was composed for an exhibition linking Wordsworth and Basho at Kamikoro Bunko, Osaka, Japan, in autumn 2016. It draws on Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’, which describes an encounter with a ‘solitary Highland Lass’ as she sings a beautiful song in a language he cannot understand — Gaelic. It takes as its starting point seven words from Wordsworth’s text, and their equivalents in translations of the poem into Gaelic (by Maoilios Caimbeul) and Japanese (by Saeko Yoshikawa); the Japanese words can also be found in one or more of Basho’s haiku. I used a Gaelic–English dictionary by Malcolm Maclennan (1925), whose English definitions of Gaelic words often contain an evocative poetry. From his English definitions of the seven selected Gaelic words, together with definitions of other words found literally on the same page, I stitched together these poems. For example, ‘hill cnoc         

’ dra

ws on the following words and definitions from Maclennan:

cnò:  a nut, a filbert
cnoc:  a knoll, an eminence
cnoid:  a splendid present
conair:  a path, way
conas:  furze, whins; strife, wrangling

The Solitary Reaper

field   raon   

A dissonant cry
in a large, ill–furnished house —
rather seek poetry, your portion
of land, your allies
on a mossy plain,
seek the grace of the highway.

*

melancholy   tiamhaidh

Parched with thirst
and melancholy
at the well
I melt into tears
and better feelings

*

vale   gleann      

A sparrow and blossom
of wood–sorrel in the dell
where I am fond of roaming —
fond of its sudden, hazy calm,
with sometimes puffs of soft wind.

*

voice  guth

An act of weeping,
an act of beseeching —
and the curlew’s voice
indicating
the place of an oracle.

*

spring   earrach

The deer don’t run,
are confident and trusting —
it’s spring,
the dog–brier greens
and I am rich.

*

song  òran

A hermit
whose dress and ornaments
appear fantastic,
whose songs, orderly and becoming,
shine like gold.

*

hill    cnoc

A gift of hazels
on the knoll —
and the path continues
through the whins.

by John Glenday

Late May.
Rapefields in open blossom.

You pull into a layby
to savour that heady fullness

of yellow, staining the air
an inspissate blue —

far closer to ocean than sky.
And suddenly your way is clear:

no ship, no berth, no sail,
no family on the quayside

waving goodbye;
only a sea that will never

become a sea, and you
already stepping from the car.

by John Glenday

You find yourself awake, in a bed
that is not your own, in a room you do not recognise,
in a city where you are a stranger

and there beside you, the daughter who never lived.
While you aged, she continued to grow,
though the dead cannot grow,

they can only grow closer.
Her name, if she ever had one, would be your name.
All those years without sleep.

Remember how she settled in you once,
heavy as a wayside stone. For as long as you live
she will draw in your breath,

cancel out your warmth,
compound every silence; in that bed,
in that room, in that city you have never visited.

by Jim Carruth

This was the nickname for him that stuck
though the rat survived barely a few months
after he trapped it in a sack at the harvest,
keeping it half–starved in a cage on a shelf

where it could watch him slowly eat his meals
of caught, shot or cheap cuts, sucking goodness
out of the marrow of an old hock for hours.
He boasted that he fed it only when it cried out

the way the school girls had done in the village,
when he spooked them with his stare, his odd ways,
his warnings on how he’d make them whistle his tune;
how virginity was a milk tooth overdue for pulling.

Sharp–tongued women now they’re quick to point out
the rat was likely the only companion he ever had
those nights together, both gnawing at thrown scraps
the loneliness of a long Winter gnawing on them.