16 Aug 2023

Jay
Whittaker

New Moon

Aug 31st

Aug 1st

To an Over Hailes
poet of 2123

After George Mackay Brown’s

To a Hamnavoe poet in 2093

Words humming in our heads –

mine scribbled in notebooks,

tapped into my phone,

typed up and sent, fat packets of data

battling for bandwidth

along the copper wire.

And you? I’m sorry, the forecast

is not good. I fear the sea

may be lapping at East Linton.

We have vast fields down to Hailes Castle,

swathed with wheat, barley

cabbages, leeks. Do you watch

rooks and gulls, swirling, circling

in a cultivator’s wake?

Does anyone sit in the tractor cab?

The river, swollen with snow melt,

flooded the path again this year,

shrugged off its old shape,

the gentle pebbled slope churned to sand,

powder-soft underfoot,

a whole new waterline.

Behind the poem...

Written in the centenary year of Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, my poem is a response to his To a Hamnavoe poet in 2093 – one of his later works, published in his final collection, Following A Lark: Poems. Like Mackay Brown, I’m writing to an imagined poet a hundred years in the future: picking up on solastalgic themes, and rooting my poem in East Lothian’s agricultural landscape, where I spent a lot of time during COVID-19 restrictions.