Trilce 61 - Poem

Trilce 61

   When the red sun is balanced on the rim of the horizon
   I dismount
   in front of the verandah, in front
   of the closed door and the shuttered windows
   of the house I set out from at dawn. Nobody's here.

   There's the stone bench
   where Nana bore my brother.
   He saddled the horses I rode bareback
   down avenues, by trellised garden walls,
   a village boy,
   the bench I left for daily yellow sunlight
   to soak the pain of childhood,
   but pain soaks back and permeates
   this page.

   The horse is a lonely god in a different world
   its sneeze is a lonely call in another language
   its long neck bends, it noses in the dust on the verandah
   its ears flick up, it
   hesitates, frightened, alert, its thick neck comes back up.
   It's seeing spirits.

   Papa must be up, grumbling, telling himself I've been out late,
   And my sisters getting the next meal ready, humming as they work.
   We want for almost nothing, but an egg
   is in my heart somehow, obstructing.

   We were a family not long ago
   but nobody is watching any longer.
   There are no lights in windows now to wait us.

   I call again. Nothing.
   Tears are close. Horse snorts again.
   They're all asleep, forever now.
   So soundly that the horse begins to nod,
   gently, slowly, as if it were reflected in the rearview of a car
   driving away in a dust-cloud,
   nodding by the faces of my family, turning to look out once more
   through the back window,
   pale in the light of farewell,
   nodding, that it's all
   all right,
   and you can
   go to sleep now

   everything's okay

Alan Riach, formerly Associate Professor of English and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, is now Head of the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Riach's books include Clearances, First & Last Songs, Open Return, This Folding Map, and a critical study, & Hugh MacDiarmid Epic Poetry. Riach is also the series editor of the collected works of Hugh MacDiarmid, published by Carcanet Press.

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