As Orkney’s annual St Magnus Festival unfolds, it’s good to remember what an inspirational place Orkney has been for poets, not just George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir but the two featured below.
Robert Rendall (1898-1967), author of the first two poems, was a draper in Kirkwall and an expert on molluscs and seashells.
Glasgow-born Charles Senior (1919-1975) spent his final years in Orkney, where he ran a bookshop.
THE HORSE-MILL
Beside the heavenly meadows daisied with stars
The planets yoked in team – Uranus, Mars,
Jove, Neptune, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Earth –
Not saddled now to run with tightened girth,
But to the mill’s unwieldy lever bound,
Wheel their enormous burden round and round.
Linked to the trees, harnessed with hame and trace,
They stumble round the tracks of cosmic space,
With slow hard step, necks bent, and flanks a-sweat
Turning yon beam, the sun for axle set.
To grind what corn in what celestial mill
Move these great Titans, shouldering onward still?
ANGLE OF VISION
But, John, have you seen the world, said he,
Trains and tramcars and sixty-seaters,
Cities in lands across the sea –
Giotto’s tower and the dome of St Peter’s?
~
No, but I’ve seen the arc of the earth,
From the Birsay shore, like the edge of a planet,
And the lifeboat plunge through the Pentland Firth
To a cosmic tide with the men who man it.
FULMARS
When it comes to sea cliffs
I am scared to go
too close to their edges,
the long drop below
would draw me down
from the sheer pleasure of vertigo:
such a fearful thrill
sucks like a groundswell
at the most thrawn will.
~
Trepidatious with ifs
I inch on wary toe
to see on sandstone ledges
unfledged chicks of artic snow,
lose my fear and frown
feasting eyes on feathered show,
for parent fulmars revel
in their winkle spiral
between foam and nesting sill.
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