A Ship Of Stone

St Magnus Cathedral

You built a ship,
A tall ship of stone,
To sail our souls in,
With a crew of painted saints
To fill the sheets of faith with song enough
To lift stone into sky.

Now,
A thousand years of
Eroded stone and windworn wood, and
Watching the sea, and
Reaching for the wind, and
This ship sags against its anchors.

You built a ship of stone,
A tall ship of stone,
Crewed with saints,
To fill her with song.
And she is still here,
Anchored and earthbound.
Have you forgotten the songs
Of stone and hope and heart
That could have lifted her to the clouds?




This poem is inspired by St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall on Orkney Mainland. I wrote the first draft of it before I ever discoverdd that the Cathedral is called the "ship of stone" - its shape had really captured by interest: long and narrow, like an upturned longship - witha crew of painted saints...This year is also being celebrated as the  (probable) 900th anniversary of Magnus' death with exhibitions and events across the islands

Well-smoked and slightly confused

Well-smoked and slightly confused

at the Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie

last thoughts of a blackhouse on N Uist

I don’t know why these places feel so familiar, and so comfortable. I didn’t grow up in a blackhouse or spend my summers in one of those quaint 2-room tin-shack summer houses by a windswept western beach, but they feel so instantly familiar that I am left confused.

N Uist, looking out

 In the peat-smoked interior of the long, dark, heather-roofed house, the box-bed, the worn dresser, the enamel pans on their nails, I know them all. My grandparents lived in a tenement in  Campbeltown at the tail end of the Mull of Kintyre - the dead-end, they call it now although when we visited there, there was still an RAF base at Macrihanish and a ferry over from Glasgow. That row of tall houses, with their stairs worn into alarming ripples by years of shuffling feet and the outside loo where giant sea-slaters lurked in wait, is long gone. My memories are of darkness and dark uncomfortable furniture and a coal fire range and a tin bath and the cheerfulness of family and the stern-ness of grandparents who were yet indulgent. And the walk in the morning with a jug to the dairy down the road…
and i wonder if the furniture in that upstairs apartment was essentially that of any highland home or any highland couple of a certain vintage, a sort of standard set that might have been found in blackhouse, or croft or tenement apartment in Campbeltown

And that doll’s house of a seasonal home, corrugated iron and sleepers shaping two rooms and looking like the refuge of a maiden aunt. Perhaps that what it is: those clothes hanging behind the door could be her clothes, that coat her coat, the smell of soap, the pin-point neatness, the small ornaments, the understated evidence of a quiet life lived by being and not by owning, all this could be hers.

But I am still standing here in the Highland Folk Museum, blinking in the sunlight and heading for a bit of singing stillness in Leanach Church

N Uist, looking in

Ancestors in the wood

Te Papa, New Zealand

Myself as a tourist, wandering and revelling in carvings and carved spaces. There are living marae and vibrant wharenui out beyond the wall of the museum. There are people who still sing to the waking ancestors. Te Papa is the National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. It is wonderful

I step down to enter the Wharenui, respectfully barefoot, slipping in to sit quiet under the glaring eyes and tattooed bodies of carved, wooden ancestors.
 

NZ is full of ancestors

Watching people, it pulls us into silence, this place, into simply sitting. Children, laughing and babbling out there in the marae, leave their noisiness with their shoes by the door and, Maori, Pakeha and foreign tourist alike, all stand and look. No cameras. Just a moment of peace before they are called on and leave the strange hairy man alone again on the chairs.

For me, this place is full of presences and the shapes who have loitered on the edge of my senses since I arrived in New Zealand take form and I feel these short, green, tattooed bodies around me. I would like to dance a prayer here in a cloud of scented smoke but instead I find myself reciting poems and blessings out of my own far away lands*

Power of the raven,
Power of the rain on the hills,
Power of the wind over the moor,
Power of the hare in the grass
Be thine.

Grace of the clover,
Grace of the geese in the loch,
Grace of the gunmetal grey clouds,
Grace of the white clouds that catch the light
Be thine**

This wharenui is transplanted. A museum artefact, moved with blessing and permission and respectfully contained and even at this distance from its place of origin, I can sense the root that still links wharenui to marae and back to home. But what would it be like to stand in a living wharenui within a living marae while the voices of a strong and vibrant people echo round the walls and remind the carvings of their descendants and the families they gave life to?

*and later a Maori friend tells me that the spirits like to hear voices: that prayers (and poems) are gifts to them that help the ancestors stay here, with us.

** The lines come from a blessing prayer from my book “Old stones and ancient bones: poems from the hollow hills”. The final verse is an ending from a much older blessing
 

Brodgar
Slip into stillness
Beside a tall stone
Bristled and bearded with lichen.

Listen to the voices that 
Whisper along the wind,
Through the grass,
Out of the old stone itself,
Saying,

Power of the raven,
Power of the rain on the hills,
Power of the wind over the moor,
Power of the hare in the grass
Be thine.

Grace of the clover,
Grace of the geese in the loch,
Grace of the gunmetal grey clouds,
Grace of the white clouds that catch the light
Be thine

Stillness of the wave on the shore,
Stillness of stone in the Ring,
Stillness of sunrise behind the ridges,
Stillness of long sleep in the hollow hills
Be thine

Strength of the gull’s freedom,
Strength of the bull’s endurance,
Strength of the rooks’ gathering,
Strength of the crab’s stealth
Be thine

May no day be grievous to thee,
May each day be joyous to thee,
May love of each face be thine
May death on pillow be thine,
Honour and compassion.