Lydia Harris

sweet gall burn

with words from Rick Barton’s talk about the Iron Age Excavations at Swartigill, October 2023

crosses open moorland coarse clay packed with rubble she floods drains worksome tools opens a kist with her rough passage recovers a blue glass bead sweet gall burn connects doorways to courtyards to a sinuous south wall there’s nothing tender happening under the crescent moon sweet gall burn peels away burbles along assembles the line in the space between she breaks the spark the tiny charge across the remnant of her bed of gravels sweet gall burn is spirit of a mother a scripture I say to her I see you how do you see me hurtling sweet gall burn

we find a slow worm the day I meet the man I-hope-to-marry’s family for the first time

 she’s a passage with discarded side cells   her heart beats in the central chamber   she mimes drift wood birch  alder  hazel willow   she is a riddle with water drops   slow worming through the lacey condensation   what did she see through her fragile third eye   two roses in a beaded circle   a star-in- chief over the compost heap at Whitmore   my first visit   his other wife dead not a year   she slithered into leaves and grass cuttings  fragilis  a slow work   no one knows how long

we carry lands, the little horse of the round tower and me

with a line from Robert Dick’s letter to his sister

I’m calling you   walk me to rising ground   more remote than a mountain   your body hardly discernible floating with the wind   climbing among rocks   jumping between hillocks   feeding on birch leaves  you are the only proper horse for this journey   I have never seen so many cornflowers   they enquire about mechanical time

of you and the shrew  I found at Rigg House years before we met

on edge of spinning in the waste paper basket  snout beyond whiskers   coat of silk  musky odour  your time among dead leaves  within the hearth  oats  barley   you give me a lignite bracelet   I give you a bronze voice  this is written in your presence   you are ink   your words amaze the pen  you the husband   you the tide   you the moon   you making me minute by uneasy minute   by cranesbill   by honeysuckle

Lydia Harris has made her home in the Orkney island of Westray. Her second collection Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World is out with Blue Diode now. 

Lydia wrote the following about her poems:

Here in Westray I have ready access to new archaeological thinking. That patient uncovering and reading of tiny signs to guess at other lives feels like the way poetry works in my head. I love the language of archaeology, the way archaeologists summon lives from remnants.

‘sweet gall burn’ was a response to a dig conducted last year in Caithness. The film which accompanied the discussion of the findings showed the burn in full spate and I felt hurtled into a half-understood, half-articulated world by the water. That hurtling signalled that I could write about strangely resonant memories and that my experience, half-understood, half-articulated could be the body of a poem. I was beginning to learn that poetry holds steady the things I don’t want to write about, memories of awkward encounters, painful reflections.

I have been writing a series of poems about the baker and geologist from Thurso, Robert Dick. He was a meticulous recorder of his landscape, and I was arrested by his mention of jumping between hillocks in a letter to his sister. It seemed such a carefree thing to do and made me imagine Dick in a new way.

The little horse is a memory of Westray folk talking about Garrons, small highland ponies farmers once worked with. The assemblage ends with another memory. I encountered the shrew long before my husband but I love the effect of yoking experiences and seeing what they say one to the other.