Hamnavoe

We're off to Orkney in the next few weeks, and will be staying in Stromness where the poet George Mackay Brown spent most of his life - I've been re-reading sections of his autobiography (as pictured) in part-preparation ;-)

And here is Mackay Brown's famous poem, Hamnavoe (the Viking name for Stromness), which recounts a day in the life of his Father - who was a local postman ...

... both the poem, and the book, are filling me with anticipation for our first visit to Orkney since August 2008:


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 cart-horse 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,
Rosy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. The brass
Tongue of the bellman fore-tolled
`Coon concert!’… ‘Cargo of English coal!’…

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 the 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. Ploughboy
And milklass tarried 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.

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George Mackay Brown (1921 - 1996)

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