“You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, as in a recording studio, or a strongroom.”
—Kathleen Jamie visits Maeshowe chambered cairn at midwinter, for the London Review of Books, 2003
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n24/kathleen-jamie/into-the-dark
#Scottish #literature #midwinter #solstice #Orkney #archaeology #prehistory #neolithic
He has gone down into darkness at the wrecked end of the year
And is lying, gaberlunzie, in the needled nest of frost…
—Gerry Cambridge, “Processional at the Winter Solstice”
published in Notes for Lighting a Fire (HappenStance Press 2012)
Angus at midwinter
or near as makes no odds –
faint shadows raxed
over fields of dour earth,
every fairmer’s fenceposts
splashed with gold.
—Kathleen Jamie, “Solstice II”
in SELECTED POEMS (Picador 2018
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/kathleen-jamie/selected-poems/9781509882953
