A new poem for Martin

After emigrating to Australia (25 years ago) I would phone home to Scotland each 12th January to wish happy birthday to my friend Martin Currie. He died in 2018, age 75. Every year since then, on Martin's birthday, I've posted a poem online because we can't have our usual blether on the phone.

They've been poems that I like which also bring to mind my friend. They connect in some way with his character, his zest for life. I think they say something about the Martin I knew (who -- like us all -- contained within his being a multiverse of perfect imperfections).

Until now, I've posted poems by other writers. This year, it's one of mine. I was sitting in our Canberra garden, taking a break from Zoom meetings and reading policy documents on too many screens. And out of nowhere on a spring day, this appeared. It will suffice.

On The Quiberon Peninsula Looking Out To Sea

for Martin Currie

There, on a sliver of land in North-West France,

the slate grey sea extends as far as I can tell:

all the way to its vanishing point

where space and time collapse or merge. 

No horizon. 

No past, present or future. 

Then and there

here and now

one and the same,

except I know that cannot be.

I sit here on this southern island, in a suburb full

of little boxes … little boxes

made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same …

in a spring garden with its new daffodils

(not even close to being a host

but unquestionably golden)

jonquils, primroses, violets,

and an insistent rosemary bush.

Wattle birds strip the quince of blood-red goodness.

They flee when I turn my head to look.

Back there, you stand (... I sit of course)

looking along the coast from Quiberon's peninsula

beyond Carnac, whose minor and even major megaliths

you dismissed with customary panache

(or was it disdain)

to southern France then Spain

then on and on and on

to a different vanishing point.

The intervening years are nowhere to be seen,

your death a bagatelle (as you were wont to call

so many 'minor' things).

We had no need of words. 

What would two old men say?

The moment was enough.

*****

This is one of a group of new poems. I hope to publish them in my second collection, later this year.

Edinburgh friends wrote an appreciation of Martin’s life which was published at the time in one of Scotland’s major newspapers. You can read the full obituary here.