A couple of books were put into my hands yesterday. The first was a hot-off-the-presses copy of Lupa, one of the launch batch. It’s an interesting feeling holding the first pukka copy of a published novel. I’ve held the proof copy, but this is a different sensation. The second was a copy of the Realms of Gold anthology which I mentioned before, in which I have five poems. It was nice to find that I had won the Vera Rich Memorial Prize with my poem ‘A Scottish Autumn’. This isn’t a big prize, as the range of contributors to the anthology is limited, so I’m not about to exaggerate its importance, but it is named after a poet for whom I had enormous respect.
I wrote ‘A Scottish Autumn’ several years ago basing it on three paintings by Scottish landscape artist Tom Barron. The committee said of it: ‘The judgment here, with respect to this poem, is that it stood out for its local colour, imagistic clarity, and its intelligence.’ I have reproduced it below.
A Scottish Autumn
i.
when I was wee I used to buy
tiny drums of ice cream
wrapped round with a paper label
the melt ran down my fingers
and scented them vanilla
on train journeys banked above
where the Earn meanders
I would see bales
fallen chessmen on
an abandoned board
and a sudden trove of tastes
and smells would open up
I would find my fingers on
the carriage-window
as though to pick up
a melting memory
ii.
‘lassie – pit a bunnet awn’
the farmer took pity on my reddening face
and the way my hair shone with sweat
we children swarmed upon the stubble field
it was our holiday to help heave the big
brick-bales of straw onto the flat-bed trailer
as the mountain grew the farmboys took them
out of our hands belt-buckle-high for the boys
but where our faces were a glow of heat
and hefted them into the hard-blue of the sky
our reward was some Tizer from the tractor-cab
now look at these – an overturned colonnade
awaiting the fork-lift like a bull awaits an axe
iii.
close-to there is grey
and there is green
and the must
like old clothes
in the Sally Army shop
not the spitting dust
of summer
the icy water from
a seasons-old furrow
overtops one shoe
and these lone
old-men-of-the-fields
stand
mute as blocks
haphazard
lumbered ghosts
of a past
harvest
Marie Marshall 