Caledonia Remembers Poem by Sheena Blackhall

The extra magic of history's hocus pocus
Distance of time can blur or sharpen focus

Three thousand years BC, flint weapons scraped my sides in Orkney
Building the tomb of Eagles long ago
So few people, always the mists, the haar
The keening winds. Time burning fossils in stone, intaglio

I seem to hear the echoing cries of murder
Bog people sacrificed in the lost aeons
Pictish armies weaving through the forests
Wattle and woad the clank of roman legions

Monks and warriors shuffled centuries
Like packs of cards, knaves saints and charlatans
Vikings stained my settlements with blood
My country raised up Kings and champions

Wallace, Brus, both fierce as wolves in winter
And those who sailed beyond my shores to fight
The Garde Ecossaise marched with Joan of Arc
The Maid of Orléans, God's acolyte

The extra magic of history's hocus pocus
Distance of time can blur or sharpen focus

The Mouth of Hell, carved in the Rosslyn chapel
Heralded awful tidings, a nation's pain
Flodden… my finest children scythed like grass
Tears from the widowed, fell like heavy rain

Sometimes I dream of that pale, pretty widow,
Mary, come from France. So young! So fresh!
And that retiarius Knox, forever circling
Trying to trap her in his righteous mesh

Who'd think James shared a drop of Mary's blood!
The wisest fool in Christendom, it was said
Along with his court of sycophants, witch burners
He ‘swapped a stony couch for a feather bed'


Pah! How the Stuarts intrigued and connived
With favourites, mistresses, plots and rebellion
My soil was tilled by fire, by sword, by plague
Then Holland sent us William the Orangeman

The Hanoverians….Victoria's prince
My coast has always been an open door
From Hanseatic times. My children sail
To trade and emigrate, invent, explore

The extra magic of history's hocus pocus
Distance of time can blur or sharpen focus

In nearer decades, horrors mushroomed up
The Flanders battlefields, the Blitz, Iraq
How things go round and round, a cursed mandala
Saracen and Crusader gallop back

Lately, the chance arose to freely rule
My hatchlings voted yes, their elders no
So so, we live in interesting times
For mighty oaks from tiny seedling grow