MEMORIZING

Hello my lovelies!

I was chatting to the 'other' Kerrie the other day and she mentioned that she and her husband are planning a trip to the Orkneys next year.  The Orkneys are islands way, way up and off the north of Scotland.

This got me thinking about a poem I learned a few years ago.  "I think I'll get that poem out again and refresh my memry." I said to myself and so I have.  I have printed it off and I am re-learning a verse a day as I have my breakfast.

The poem was writen by George Mackay Brown and it is about a day in the life of his father who was a postman.  I love how the poem begins before daybrak, traces the various 'doings' of the fishing town and ends with a verse showing how much the poet loved his father.

Here's the poem.

HAMNAVOE

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.

Closes...and

seapinks.

Love Nanxx  PS  I've made three spelling errors in the main text - not in the poem.  See if you can find them and perhaps you would like to count the number of similes in the poem.