There is no passport to this country,
it exists as a quality of the language.
It has no landscape you can visit;
when I try to listen to its vistas
I don't think of that round tower, though
only two exist in Scotland though
both are near me. There are figures on
an aunt's old clock, cottars; Scots
as marketed to Scots in the last century:
these are too late. I seek something
between troughs, a green word dancing
like weed in a wave's translucence,
a pane not smashed for an instance
through which the Dingle Dell of Brechin
sinks into the park like a giant's grave
from which his bones have long since
walked on air. Into this hole in
the gums of the language I see a name
roll like a corpse into the plague pits:
Bella. Its is both my grandmothers'.
Beauty, resilient as girstle, reveals
itself: I see all of Scotland
rolling down and up on death's yoyo.
There is no passport to this country.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem