After yesterday’s Gannet, here is another predator profiled in Beasts of Scotland, from Edwin Morgan’s 1996 poetry collection, Virtual and Other Realities (Carcanet, £6.95).
The sequence was commissioned by the Glasgow International Jazz Festival and was set to music by Tommy Smith.
WILDCAT
When did you last see me?
Never, perhaps.
You saw the ferns moving – was it in the wind?
It’s true the fronds are a good camouflage
for my stripes, but I can tell you
I was not there, not then.
Does that make it any easier,
I mean, that you really failed to miss anything?
If you still want to meet
this shy, solitary, rare etcetera –
well do you? – one of those days
when I am not snatching rabbits
but casing your chicken-coop? –
not extinct you know, maybe a spirit –
spirit of Scotland, eh? – I haven’t lost
my drift: here you are then,
meeting me, at the wire of the hen-run,
twilight woods behind, I’m doing my crouching
and spitting, gently lashing a bushy tail,
all right? You want to communicate?
Try to stroke me, lose a finger.
Try to tame me, lose a face.
But frankly this is academic.
I shun farms, crofts, dogs, guns; I’ve had that.
Where I love to be, I doubt
if you will ever find me.
I prowl the high bracken.
I am comforted by the rocks.
I rub the harsh trunks
of the Caledonian forest,
a ghost among ghosts.
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