As summer’s longest days stretch ahead, the mountains of Skye will as always attract the energetic and intrepid. These two powerful poems - the first by Rayne Mackinnon (Netherbow Arts Centre, 1986), the second by Andrew Young (Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1998) - catch the drama of the island’s high places.
THE CUIILLIN
When bitter passion stirred the earth
The Cuillin first knew pangs of birth,
Tugging each way inside earth’s womb,
Cracked the soil, gasped for room,
Shook off the heather and the grass
Then froze in an ungainly mass;
The lava took thought, bided its time
And then once more begin to climb
Till earth had no more soot to spew;
Then in the vacuum, winds rushed back,
Sucked by the mountains’ magnet, blew
And, hard as iron, filed away
The gabbro, that each storm sung black,
Until the peaks, in man’s own day,
Gaptoothed, lie growling at the sky.
Thickening the darkness, I’ve seen them lean
Over the glen, and stamp the scene
With anger, while the hissing wind
Blows night around, and chases it
From peak to peak, until the light,
With grey fingers, gropes to find
Stray corners of the sullen range
Whose iron passions never change.
THE CUILLIN HILLS
Each step a cataract of stones
So that I rise and sink at once,
Slowly up the ridge I creep;
And as through drifting smoke
Of mist grey-black as a hoodie-crow
The ghostly boulders come and go
And two hoarse ravens croak
That hopped with flapping wings by a dead sheep,
All is so hideous that I know
It would not kill me though I fell
A thousand feet below;
On you, Black Cuillin, I am now in hell.
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