The poem below reminds me very much of a holiday spent in Scourie, in Sutherland. The old croft had been converted – to a degree. It looked down over still very evident lazy beds to Scourie bay, with the pyramid of Ben Stack looming to the east, and heathland scattered with remnants of the glacial age running to the sea in the west. An old, almost falling-to-pieces bench, backed to the house, gave a place from which to view the sunset in the evening, and on one occasion we were visited by a Wheatear.
July Evening
Norman MacCaig
A bird’s voice chinks and tinkles
Alone in the gaunt reedbed –
Tiny silversmith
Working late in the evening.
I sit and listen. The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.
Flowers’ closing time: bee lurches
Across the hayfield, singing
And feeling its drunken way
Round the air’s invisible corners.
And grass is grace. And charnock
Is gold of its own bounty.
The broken chair by the wall
Is one with immortal landscapes.
Something has been completed
That everything is a part of,
Something that will go on
Being completed forever.
Rectory Ramblings 