In the woods where I roam, the Glen between the two rivers, young horses run when the throat of the sky closes and night comes. I had been imagining all these weeks I was alone here— my weans at home bathed in screen-light, my kind shuttered up stowed against the news that rips across the slates like sea—but suddenly I find I am not: a dyker has been working, slowly packing the walls that cross land and years like old sentences, tight, elegant, other worldly. He has been so slow I had not noticed, but yet look at him now so far away on the brow of a hill that he is merging with cloud. This quite ordinary man, this engineer, this bookbinder, this clock fixer, this shaman, all this time he has been mending the seams.
Hugh McMillan is a prize winning poet from Penpont in South West Scotland. He has had eight published collections and has featured in many anthologies, three times in the Scottish Poetry Library’s online selection Best Scottish Poems of the year. His poems have also been chosen three times to feature on National Poetry Day postcards, the latest in 2016. In 2017 he was writer in residence at the Harvard Summer School. He currently curates #plagueopoems a daily series of poems filmed from lockdown. https://pestilencepoems.blogspot.com/ In 2020 he was chosen as one of 4 ‘Poetry Champions’ for Scotland, to seek out and commission new work. His website is at https://www.hughmcmillanwriter.co.uk/