ON BRINDLED MOOR

On Brindled Moor there is a nothingness

That only a bog can invoke

And this vast Hebridean peat bog

Articulates un-knowingness

Saying, there is nothing here,

Only what the eye can’t see.

This brown earth, stunned out of wonder,

With its wandering watercourses

Running through the peat; a feit,

Which resembles veins or sinews,

A bugha, a green bow-shaped sweep of moor grass,

Formed by the winding of the stream;

A rionnach maoim, casting shadows

On the moorland by clouds moving

Across the sky on a bright, windy day,

Lighting up what is suddenly

Not empty or meaningless at all.

Here we have chucky,clitter and fedster

Pipkrares and shuckle

Muxy rout and slunk,

And migrant birds arriving from distant places.

‘It is time to sing the world back into being

That static things may be caught

In the very act of becoming’