Wee Scunner

image borrowed from bing

Wee Scunner

“Yer bum’s out the windae”--Scottish saying.

On quiet nights, between trains,

I can hear the faint lullaby of the pipes,

                 & I smile as the sandman

                 puts his thumbs gently on my lids,

                              for I know that soon I will be

transported,

                dreaming of blue faces,

                              fierce Picts, clans of Celts,

standing with

                bare-assed kilted brothers

                              facing Hadrian’s Wall again,

                                                        remembering the Romans

& their fookin’ kingdom of Britannia;

drawn to the deep cold lochs,

to the Highlands dotted with long-haired cattle--

                 enjoying some kind of past-life connection,

to the last of the fir forests,

                 to the wet mountainous terrain,

where once I was a villager,

foraging for a living above 3000 feet,

                  before the deforestation of the region,

                  still alive with bear, wolf, elk, & lynx,

                  before

they were hunted to extinction;

and some nights I remember more,

a lifetime or two,

                 up in the Northern Isles,

a fisherman residing in the Shetlands.

Living now in the vastness of America,

it seems intellectually

               claustrophobic to consider

               that once or thrice I Iived

in a country smaller than Texas,

with a narrow waist to the South,

                only 60 miles wide at its border with England,

where one could see Ireland only 19 miles away,

where Norway or France 

                        could be reached within

                        a few days of sailing.

My genetic recall tingles

                        each time I see an image

                                         or a movie of Scotland;

                                                more so than any other foray

                                                                             or exposure to

any other corner of the globe;        still one must face the fact

that each incarnation comes with its own inherent

limitations.

Sadly,

as I age in this body,

                  traveling has become difficult,

                                        & finances have become meager;

so I have begun to rely on “remote viewing”

                                        & “astral projection”,

accepting the onerous fact than only in the land of dreams

will I frolic in the bonnie beauty that still awaits;

                           remaining confident that my rugged roots

sprang from a Scottish paradise

                           that I will never revisit

                           with this fatigued husk. 

                

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over at dVerse Poets Poetics

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