Steve Ely
Winter 2024 | Poetry
An Doirlinn
An Doirlinn (‘the landing’) is a Neolithic site located
at the foot of the tidal island of Orasaigh, South Uist.
I
Isthmus, peninsula, tombolo, spit.
‘Landing’ derived from usage—snekkja,
bìrlinn, sgoth. A blue-ringed tidal-islet,
the shape of a guillemot’s egg—731174,
OS Explorer 453. Causewayed landing,
stacks of creels. Crab boats moored offshore.
That smash of rocks and ripped-up turf
en-route to the lovely island. Built, low-walled,
but not a dun: the cyclone’s disgorged
flint-knap scatter bespoke the Neolithic,
confirmed by subsequent excavation:
successive layers of occupation, 3,700 to 2,400 B.C.
II
When Scorpion II was lord in Nekhen
and Gilgamesh reigned in Uruk,
the farmers of Boisdale had been turning the sod
for half a thousand years—trumpeting mammoths
on Wrangel Island, sea cows roaming the plains of kelp
from Pribilof to Lewis—picked bones of garefowl
dumped on middens for the next five thousand years.
The steading no doirlinn, but a bump at the foot
of the westernmost hill in the forest of Uist,
the land-devouring ocean still a mile or more due west.
Clearing the woodland, burning back scrub;
scratching furrows between the stumps for emmer
and six-rowed bere. Aurochsen, deer and Irish elk,
gone to the dogs. Canis familiaris. Wolf and bear
to the bottom of the Minch, with the cachalots
and right whales. Paddocks for ovis, sus and bos.
Material culture: stone walls, stone hearths, stone axes;
a flaked-flint knife, smashed carinated pottery.
No hieroglyph or baked clay tablet, painted tomb
or bas-relief. Archaeological speculations
built on scant empirical altars: bloodstone bigshots
cornering the surplus, investing in astronomical
priesthoods and vernacular death-mitigation schemes:
seven days and nights I wept for my brother
until the worms of Enlil fastened in his flesh.
Deadly theatre of ritual landscape; flint arrowheads
signifying war. They mated with pigs and chapped-face children,
killed strangers for profit and neighbours in fits of rage.
In times of dearth they starved the old codgers
and fed their shrunken wreckage to the dogs.
They lived at one with Magna Mater, dug henbane beer
and Aqualung. DNA says, they’re just like us—
undestroyable serpopard, sphinx that moves the sun!
In his house beneath the ocean, Great Kraken lies waiting.
III
A great black-backed gull labours aloft
from the rocks below the turf-scabbed mound.
She’s been tugging the guts from a washed-up
porpoise, snagged beneath the wall. She settles
on the strand of Tràigh na Doirlinn to watch me
prod and probe. Zip of grinning peg-teeth.
Eye-socket caves and jailhouse window ribcage.
Tangle-stink of nacreous intestines.
This beach is good for the wreckers of dead cetaceans,
the scavengers and collectors: the lumbar vertebrae
of a pothead blackfish, somewhere in the shed;
the mandible blades of a minke whale,
lost to the tides or a rival necrophiliac
when I dallied too long at the Polochar Inn;
the digital image of the Risso’s dolphin, torn open
and wolfed by a slaughter of gleeful ravens.
What else does the kindly ocean bring?
Mary’s Nut, Sea Purse, sixty-foot trunks
of shock-root loblolly pine; skraelings stitched
into buckskin thongs, unravelling bark canoes.
Puffins, seals and narwhals. A case of Spey Royal.
A naked lady with bitten-off fingers
washed up from Tràigh Siar. Cluny’s man had her rings.
Una had her frock. The black-backed gull
had the pearls that were her eyes.
Bowed heads around a gaping lozenge of sand:
hunc tumulum benedicere dignare, eique
Angelum tuum sanctum deputa custodem.
The resurrection and the life. The kindness
of strangers in their threadbare Sunday best.
He took it all—their land, their livings, the shirts
off their humped and weal-encrusted backs.
IV
Surf breaks on Tràigh na Doirlinn and rushes
up the beachface. Clockwork sanderling
switchback in the swash-zone like speeded up footage
from a silent film, picking tiny titbits
from the foam. They’re fuelling up for Iceland
and Franz Josef Land beyond, the ever-receding
Arctic edge of the Holocene interglacial.
A whippet flies in and the sanderling lift and scatter,
flashing twittering chevrons down the beach
towards the headland at Cille Pheadair.
Uprush wipes their footprints’ blurred cuneiform.
How many billion sanderling have stopped-off here,
since ice-melt stretched the north from Spain?
Where are their embalmed, mummified corpses,
their stelae in the foam’s wet sand?
Scorpion left his mark: his skull-crushing mace
and gibbet of lapwings. Gilgamesh cleared
the sacred groves from ocean to Euphrates.
He slew the lion, glorying in life, hyena,
stag and panther. All manner of small game.
He butchered the mighty Bull of Heaven
and fed its heart to Shamash. His swastika
wheels from Göbekli Tepe to the trenches
of the western ocean, its cargo of infinite dead.
A Sailor of the 1939-1945 War,
Merchant Navy. Buried 21st August, 1940.
The pharaohs of Cluny, Westminster, Wannsee.
The dead go into the Sun. Ice-melt washes
their genocides clean. Atlantic ripping away.
Extract from a longer poem, Orasaigh (Broken Sleep Books, 2024)
Steve Ely has published over a dozen of books and pamphlets of poetry, including Eely and Orasaigh (both 2024). His books have won or been nominated for a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Ted Hughes Award, the Northern Writers Award for Poetry, the Michael Marks Award, and the Laurel Prize. He teaches creative writing in academic, residential and community settings. His edited anthology, Apocalyptic Landscape: Poems from the Expressionist Poetry Workshop, was published in 2024. He is Director of the Ted Hughes Network at the University of Huddersfield, and has written several academic papers about Hughes, and a monograph, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire.