At steady pace carry light the green-silver glint of glen, the gorge,
its hurling, harried cascades endlessly shaping crags, the falls.
Give a thought to water’s bringing down of trees after songs of pine and fir.
Listen with your eyes to fern lullabies, rain tickled lichen, the curtain of trickles.
In a flash you spot the little huggermugger Puck’s shape-shifting frolics.
He’s now lichen, then moss, now fern, a broken tree stump, a buzzard or deer.
He bamboozles with peat coloured water, mud, ooze. He goes under your boots,
burbles your balance, zig-zags the path, spins above you small frets of sky.
When his impish reel stops, catch him twisting tree roots hanging in free air
moist about nooks and crannies, the gorge’s ragged edges, its sloped slimes.
Let your astounded heart embrace each form in this vast stash of being.
Each small splendour, light and shadow, lustrous shafts in woodland clearing.
In deep horizonless forest, hushed faculties of birch, larch, fir, where each climbs
from time’s chaos of crags, assembling themselves from the glen’s thin eden soil.
Neil mac Neil
Poet in Residence, Cowalfest October 2006
Neil mac Neil, Poet-in-Residence
Our resident poet for Cowalfest 2006 was Neil mac Neil spiritually from Barra, late of Greenock and now living in Spain.
Four published examples of this collaborative work between poet and artist appeared in Chapman Literary Magazine (Issue 108) in the summer of 2006. One poem and painting feature Loch Eck, the freshwater loch in the heart of the Cowal Peninsulal. Another pairing of poet and painter features reflections on Loch Fyne, on the far west of Cowal.
