I am missing Scotland. I might be there about now. Visiting the islands, mountains, castles, and getting ready to help move my daughter home. But that won’t be happening. I was there in March when we were advised to come home. Why leave the remote remote western isles, and the fresh sea breeze?
In October, I paired some poems of Mary Oliver with images of Scotland. So how about some coastal images with her poems? The colors above and in the one below— blue gray green lavender. And Oliver’s poem Tides:
Every day the sea
blue gray green lavender
pulls away leaving the harbor’s
dark-cobbled undercoat
slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls
walk there among old whalebones, the white
spines of fish blink from the strandy stew
as the hours tick over; and then
far out the faint, sheer
line turns, rustling over the slack,
the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over
the clam beds, slippery logs,
barnacle-studded stones, dragging
the shining sheets forward, deepening,
pushing, wreathing together
wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures
spilling over themselves, lapping
blue gray green lavender, never
resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
continent, everything.
And here you may find me
on almost any morning
walking along the shore so
light-footed so casual.
From, A Thousand Mornings, 2012
I Go Down To The Shore
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
― from, A Thousand Mornings
From the poem, The Sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
. . . .
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume One, 1992
Carn Liath is an Iron Age broth on the shore of the North Sea. It was excavated in the 19th century and later determined to have been inhabited since the Bronze Age. What might our ruins say in thousands of years?
Of the Empire
We will known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
From, Red Bird, 2008
On the Beach
On the beach, at dawn:
four small stones
clearly hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the world,
and many formations might they make
and who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
When the sun broke
it poured willingly its light
over the stones
that did not move, not at all,
just as, to its always generous term,
it shed its light on me,
my own body that loves,
equally, to hug another body.
Mary Oliver, from Swan, 2010
