ALASTAIR Reid's celebrated poem is a beguiling mixture of the lyrical and judgmental.
He homes in with deadly effect on what he sees as his countrymen's and women's Calvinist tendency to non-enjoyment against the odds. The piece was first published in Weathering (Canongate, 1978).
SCOTLAND
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. "What a day it is!"
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
"We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!"
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