From thin seams under humble stone it begins,
a rippling thrum of fresh, untroubled thought,
voices gathering, persuading the moss
to divide, to feed on silence, soil and root.
It learns the grammar of the braes and gulleys,
repeats the cailleach’s words in open ground,
carries the quickened sky in fragments on its back.
It passes where old hands shaped their land,
where crofters cut lazy beds under the wind,
and coaxed life from stubborn ground:
endless days bound by peat, frost and hunger.
The Shee carries faded prints of boot and hoof,
the ash of a thousand fires, the measure of lives,
a human nearness, rough but held in scale.
Then came the notices, the measured lines,
crofts robbed out, roofs surrendered to rain,
sheep grazing where voices used to rise.
The stream carried the stories where they fell,
held fragments: names, a spindle, a broken song
drifting memories, down, past emptied hills.
It thickens now with what we choose to lose.
The sheen of oil, the bright, unyielding scraps,
ghosts of metals ground from deeper bones,
the slow, unseeing drift of what we waste.
It does not judge; it gathers and it bears,
a moving ledger none of us can close.
Yet still along its banks the saplings bud.
Oak, rowan, birch – small sentences of hope,
their roots like bairns fingers learning to hold.
We plant them where the soil remembers shade.
We plant them where the wind has had its say.
We ask the hills to keep what they always knew.
And then at last it widens into tidal exhale
the mouth of a journey sung by generations
rejoices in borrowed sky, its burdened past,
embracing the sea without a word of blame.
Jim Mackintosh
