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Hallaig, by Sorley MacLean.Here translated by the poet from Scots Gaelic:
‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’
The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw the West and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig, a birch tree, and she has always been
between Inver and Milk Hollow, here and there about Baile-chuirn: she is a birch, a hazel, a straight, slender young rowan.
In Screapadal of my people where Norman and Big Hector were, their daughters and their sons are a wood going up beside the stream.
Proud tonight the pine cocks crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra, straight their backs in the moonlight – they are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birch wood until it comes up by the cairn, until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice will be under its shade.
If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig, to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone.
They are still in Hallaig, MacLeans and MacLeods, all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim: the dead have been seen alive.
The men lying on the green at the end of every house that was, the girls a wood of birches, straight their backs, bent their heads.
Between the Leac and Fearns the road is under mild moss and the girls in silent bands go to Clachan as in the beginning,
and return from Clachan, from Suisnish and the land of the living; each one young and light-stepping, without the heartbreak of the tale.
From the Burn of Fearns to the raised beach that is clear in the mystery of the hills, there is only the congregation of the girls keeping up the endless walk,
coming back to Hallaig in the evening, in the dumb living twilight, filling the steep slopes, their laughter a mist in my ears,
and their beauty a film on my heart before the dimness comes on the kyles, and when the sun goes down behind Dun Cana a vehement bullet will come from the gun of Love;
and will strike the deer that goes dizzily, sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes; his eye will freeze in the wood, his blood will not be traced while I live.
And here a reading by the poet set to music by the late great Martyn Bennett:
https://vimeo.com/25562404?fl=pl&fe=sh