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A pair of worn hands at rest on a black tweed
skirt: that is all there is to see: and yet those
deep veined hands with their broken fingernails
reveal not only a life but a way of being.
Those hands that have spun and woven and dyed
the clothes you, your husband, your children
and grandchildren wore are now fixed forever
in a held moment of stillness. You have woven
yourself and your loved ones out of time. In the
unseen cottage, hewn out of rock and weighed down
with boulders in defiance of storms, I imagine
a dark, walled clock with its spindly arms
folded as one onto the soft lap of noon.
Beneath echoes of time, on the beeswaxed dresser,
that carousel of silences: a china dog guarding each corner;
blue patterned plates and bowls; green whisky bottles;
the framed icons of the Virgin: her face, moulded
into serenity, glazed by veils of sunlight stealing
through hair-fringed window eyes. Outside, those uneven
pyramids of peat still glistening wet from deep layers
of moor where I see your bowed, shawled head shrouded
by midges. I catch that burnt honey scent of gorse
and picture black cattle daydreaming in mauves
of heather, ghosted by moist breaths of sea winds.
see you also, bent double beneath a wicker
creel of seaweed, salt water streaming down your
back like smelting silver in afternoons of spring
with peewits preening and strutting between lazybeds.
A lifetime of joy and suffering scoured on hands
which you display with deep acceptance and pride as
if you sensed that you and your kind were the last
of a royal line with that crown of scythed, gold-flecked
oats in encircled stooks, angling across stoned fields in the
taken breath of a September evening, waulked by fingers of
moonlight, with green and silver bands of mackerel winding
beneath the translucent surface of the gouged eye of bay.
Those photographed hands live on like lived poems
while you, forever faceless, lie in the island's sparse soil.
The life of you and your kind like stories knitted
around a stubborn fire to keep the warmth within.
In 1954 the great American photographer, Paul Strand spent three months in South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, and recorded life in a traditional community that was soon to change. One of Strand's most haunting images consists simply of a pair of aged hands resting on the knees of a faceless woman.
skirt: that is all there is to see: and yet those
deep veined hands with their broken fingernails
reveal not only a life but a way of being.
Those hands that have spun and woven and dyed
the clothes you, your husband, your children
and grandchildren wore are now fixed forever
in a held moment of stillness. You have woven
yourself and your loved ones out of time. In the
unseen cottage, hewn out of rock and weighed down
with boulders in defiance of storms, I imagine
a dark, walled clock with its spindly arms
folded as one onto the soft lap of noon.
Beneath echoes of time, on the beeswaxed dresser,
that carousel of silences: a china dog guarding each corner;
blue patterned plates and bowls; green whisky bottles;
the framed icons of the Virgin: her face, moulded
into serenity, glazed by veils of sunlight stealing
through hair-fringed window eyes. Outside, those uneven
pyramids of peat still glistening wet from deep layers
of moor where I see your bowed, shawled head shrouded
by midges. I catch that burnt honey scent of gorse
and picture black cattle daydreaming in mauves
of heather, ghosted by moist breaths of sea winds.
see you also, bent double beneath a wicker
creel of seaweed, salt water streaming down your
back like smelting silver in afternoons of spring
with peewits preening and strutting between lazybeds.
A lifetime of joy and suffering scoured on hands
which you display with deep acceptance and pride as
if you sensed that you and your kind were the last
of a royal line with that crown of scythed, gold-flecked
oats in encircled stooks, angling across stoned fields in the
taken breath of a September evening, waulked by fingers of
moonlight, with green and silver bands of mackerel winding
beneath the translucent surface of the gouged eye of bay.
Those photographed hands live on like lived poems
while you, forever faceless, lie in the island's sparse soil.
The life of you and your kind like stories knitted
around a stubborn fire to keep the warmth within.
In 1954 the great American photographer, Paul Strand spent three months in South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, and recorded life in a traditional community that was soon to change. One of Strand's most haunting images consists simply of a pair of aged hands resting on the knees of a faceless woman.
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