Your weekly poem, Apr. 14: “Before the Wind” by Kathleen Jamie
A poem selected by our director Nicholas Allen, Baldwin Professor in Humanities
Dear friends,
I think of the sea all the time, as I know you too think of places beyond our horizon, still there and in the mind for now. We will return to these places soon, but changed. Poetry can be a preparation for the journey we are taking even now, words a bridge for us to cross the depths. Literature invites us to look up and out as we read, the mind opening to other places and times, the strange familiar, the familiar strange.
The sea I think of is the north channel between Scotland and Ireland, which is only around fifteen miles at its narrowest. It is an old province of story and myth, of Vikings, Gaels and the cross-water kingdom of Dalriada. The way-markers of this channel range from the Giant’s Causeway to Ailsa Craig, that haunt of mad Sweeney, the king cursed by a saint and turned to a bird, its inshore waters the haunt of seabirds and selkies, half-fish, half-human, in siren song.
Kathleen Jamie is a poet from this wind-blown territory in the west of Scotland. “Before the Wind” begins as a poem of observation and ends as something else. A nature poem, yes, it is also a vision, inviting and unsettling. It has always fascinated me how a short string of sentences like this can braid a world together. Jamie does it masterfully, writing the reader into a sequence of stone, branch and flower that is possessed of its own organic logic.
I hope this visit finds you in good cheer. I think of you all during these uncertain days, in which we can at least be sure of poetry as a portal to freedoms that are open to every reader.
Be well,
Nicholas
“Before the Wind”
Kathleen Jamie
If I’m to happen upon the hill
where cherries grow wild
it better be soon, or the yellow-
eyed birds will come squabbling
claiming the fruit for their own.
Wild means stones barely
clothed in flesh, but that’s rich
coming from me. A mouth
contains a cherry, a cherry
a stone, a stone
the flowering branch
I must find before the wind
scatters all trace of its blossom,
and the fruit comes, and the yellow-eyed birds.