The Companions of Colmcille

If I never go home it is because 

the tides, I have noticed, flow in one direction 

only. With Viking anger the North Sea 

snapped at my heels on the foreshore as I 

marvelled at its circling, patterned collapse, 

the golden spiral in my Euclid turning 

before my eyes. When the Covenanter 

who led me arrived at the city gates 

he would not pay the king’s penny 

to cross the bridge but stood transfixed 

by those swithering waters. The road was closed, 

he told me, we would have to go back. 

I saw the long-beaked oystercatchers gazing 

down from their nests along the flat roofs 

and knew this for the place where Devenick, 

Ternan and Drostan had passed before me, drawn 

ever further north and east. I swore an oath 

at the mercat cross to a man who answered 

to the Earl of Montrose, and a prayer-book 

was placed in my hand. Much later, when 

the peace was won, bodies decently buried 

were exhumed and despoiled, marking 

an end to it all. I attempted to read the psalms 

in the vernacular, but did not know 

what language that was. If you throw out a hand 

in the dark of the chapel a door to the bell-tower 

will be there, and a view from above that promised 

once, not now, to make everything clear. 

1644

The Fourth Craw

i.m. Roy Fisher 

I am driving the Jacobite army north from Derby. 

Three craws sat upon a wa 

You can go there if 

you want, into that past, 

all banners and ballads, 

and lie in its grievance 

shaped to a vacancy. 

I remember the trampling 

of the flag, and a horse, 

legs gone, catching 

its tail as it fell. 

The first craw was greetin fer his maw 

Assigning legs and arms 

to this or that body 

among the tangle 

balletic tableau 

I watched the sun- 

light cross the valley 

implacable but gilding 

our profiles fondly 

as we took flight. 

The second craw fell and broke his jaw 

Living that high up 

said the woman in the courtyard 

holding my reins and 

gesturing over the hills 

anywhere else must 

feel like a come-down 

so many worlds 

of patient neglect 

stored up for our 

return and whose 

forgiveness 

won’t come cheap. 

The third craw couldna flee awa 

Following by night 

the ginnels and shambles of Leeds 

as though a blind man should trace 

with his fingers the features 

of a child’s face 

we came to the North 

good enough to have 

stayed where we left it 

And the fourth craw wasna there at aa 

the ways closed over 

behind us and all manner

of joyous lament finding 

its proper dark at last. 

David Wheatley is a poet and critic at the University of Aberdeen. David’s latest book, Child Ballad (Carcanet, 2023) explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Child Ballad was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year. David is the author of six collections of poetry and a novel and he co-edited with Ailbhe Darcy The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He has also published widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, Irish literature and Samuel Beckett. David is now writing a novel about a woman who lives between the walls of a Scottish castle and thinks she is Bonnie Prince Charlie.  

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