5 Elegy for Angus Macdonald of Cnoclinn

The oldest tree in Europe's lost
a knotty branch it could ill spare
to make a hump in Sydney ground,
not for the first time. No. But the last.
A genus of honey bees has died out,
a strain that came to us from the lost world.

Anger at that coarse canting fool
who tried to bury you meanings and all
under his turnip-cairn of texts
—you with the knowledge, he with the talk—
kept us from tears, the day you rode
down ropes in your chest of polished wood.

You were as strange in our waters as
the Atlantis-reef Rocabarraidh. Students,
we came for ancestral language, but you,
no teacher of grammar, gave us lore,
a sight down usages to the Bronze Age
and an ideal from then, older than Heaven,
the “harmony of the men of peace”.

The highest folk culture in the West
and terms from a lost, non-Greek Agora
mingled in you, our giver of words:
feallsanachd, oine, foidhirlisg.
Late on and far from heirs, you wrote
your oral learning down in a book,
a dense heaped Cadbury Hill of a book,

the history of your island, songs
and steadings of Heisgir under the sea,
black crimes from the Age of Forays, wise
folk government in the Lordship of the Isles,
astronomy and logic of the men
who taught in that curious late druidical
university of the White Mountain;

you were oath-bound to transmit these things
and you did transmit them. The book remains,
cranky, magnificent, pregnant with rethinkings
as the Watts Towers or Fort's museum,
a Celtic history indeed, a line—
for this is the meaning of the drowned lands—
by which to haul from the conqueror's sea
of myth, our alternative antiquity.

Teacher of my heart, you'll not approve
my making this in the conqueror's language
(though Calgacus used their Latin finely:
“You have made a desert and called it peace.”)
Even the claim I make at times
to writing Gaelic in English words
would make you sniff (but also smile),

but my fathers were Highlanders long ago
then Borderers, before this landfall
—“savages” once, now we are “settlers”
in the mouth of the deathless enemy—
but I am seized of this future now.
I am not European. Nor is my English.

And perhaps you too were better served here
than in Uist of the Sheldrakes and the tides
watching the old life fade, the toradh,
the good, go out of the island world.
Exile's a rampart, sometimes, to the past,
a distiller of spirit from bruised grains;
this is a meaning of the New World.

The good does not go out of the past.
Angles of the moving moon and sun
elicit fresh lights from it continually;
now, in the new lands, everyone's Ethnic
and we too, the Scots Australians, who've been
henchmen of much in our self-loss
may recover ourselves, and put off oppression.

This, then, for the good you put on us,
round-tower of Gaelic, grand wrongheaded one,
now you have gone to the dark crofts:
the oldest tree in Europe's shed
a seed to us—and the Otherworld
becomes ancestral, a code of history,
a style of fingering, an echo of vowels,
honey that comes to us from the lost world.