Highland Fling, Michelangelo, Florence, Stained Glass at Harnhill, Dark Lady
[An ekphrastic poem is one inspired by another work of art, for example Keats and his Grecian Urn or Auden, in his Musee des Beaux Arts, by the works of Brueghel.]
Highland Fling
You are not dancing but
Floating
Over crossed Scottish swords
Flashing
Defiance at gravity
Flouting
The drag of mortality
Freeing
Your heart from its heaviness
Flaunting
The reward of your training
Flying
In the gale of the spirit
Flaming
Heart, face and hands skyward
Flinging.
Your dance is ending, the pipes are
Falling
Silent, you rejoin the world of the
Floundering
And become again my dad.
Fleeting
My glimpse of your sky-flung soul.
My dad was a Highland dancer and a very good one, so much so that he became a judge at various Highland gatherings, including the most prestigious one, at Braemar. In the summer of 2026 we scattered his ashes there, together with my mum's, in accordance with her wishes, for he proposed to her there, nearly 75 years ago. My whole family came, and it was very poignant to have three further generations standing there where it all began.
Among mum's papers we found an article dad had written (for The Caledonian magazine in 1958) in which he expressed his passion for Highland dancing. Reading this was when I thought for the first time that I had seen into his soul: he had been the sort of father who showed love by working hard and providing. So that article and the powerful feelings that came from standing with my family at the place where he danced was the inspiration for this poem. RIP Capt Ian Cameron Gibson.
Just one further note on the odd structure. The bagpipes aren't too obvious a choice for dancing because, as a wind instrument, they don't appear able to carry a beat. But they do! Those crafty pipers put in bunches of grace notes to join the phrases of the music together. There are names for the various bunches - shakes, doublings, taorluaths and the mighty seven note crunluath. Forced from the bag at high pressure, these fists of demihemisemiquavers give all the percussive punch you could possibly want. Why am I banging on about technical matters in this way? Because in this poem I was trying to capture that structure, with the various F words (sorry) representing the bunches of grace notes and the phrases between them standing for the musical phrases of the pipe tune. I hope that makes sense... Anyway I claim to know a little bit about pipe music because, as well as dad being a dancer, his dad was a piper.
Michelango
Naked and unashamed in broadest day,
Unmoved, unmoving, you can never share
Our thrilled bemusement at your standing there.
You grant our wish, and equally betray –
Muscles unmoving, lips that cannot say,
Brittle eternity of marble hair,
Proportionate perfection! Yet you are
Of stone, not flesh, in flight from our decay.
You look down with a mute I told you so,
Rebuke the perfect place where we would go
With all the flesh’s longing to be fair:
For in his marble, Michelangelo,
If he had missed the giant prisoned there,
Had formed no shape to shelter his despair.
Florence
An angel once walked here,
with power to waken stone -
So what does this people make
of the superhuman frame,
The severe classical frown,
not disdaining but ignoring
Those who walk at shin level
to his unshakeableness?
Or of what other masters left,
renaissance forms
Assured eternally
of their own elegance?
Like a youngster doomed
to an older brother far too
Athletic or clever,
we can only learn
to make the best of our pettiness,
and mirror him in caricature,
in a million mawkish plasters.
Stained Glass at Harnhill
We are friends of the Bridegroom,
apostles of staid gesture and astonished face.
We strow gifts for the wedding
over the sanctuary floor,
incarnadine and cobalt and chrome
confetti for the Lord of light
for the King is coming.
O floor, floor, floor, how blessed
though thirty generations tread you down
is your homely Cotswold stone:
now to be kissed by His gifts of light,
now to kiss His wounded feet,
for the steps of the King of love have borne Him here
and the feast is ready.
Dark Lady
Is that you, peering out between the lines,
The fourteen bars he conjured for your cage?
He lured you where eternal summer shines
And promised you’d be free from mortal rage.
We know a bit – he swears that you are fair –
Your lips, your breasts, the black wires on your head –
He says how much he loves your voice, but where
Does he record a single word you said?
So did he break your bondage to decay?
We neither see nor hear you. He’s to blame.
One word our greatest wordsmith didn’t say,
He hasn’t even let us know your name.
What strangely lifeless immortality.
Where is a living word to speak for me?
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