Succoth

Cattleshed

Broken by time 

Wilderness and woodland

Stiff trunked trees

Around a place

Of shelter.

Glen Lossie

And a name for bogland,

Nearby Soccach

On the point of a ridge

A ruin, a simple cottar house.

Did the Angel of Yaweh

Descend, here in the damp hills

Of Scotland nowhere west of Jordan,

To argue the toss with Jacob

And there, at the end of Exodus,

Build a byre for the beasts?

So from Padan-aram,

Far from Mesopotamia, or nearer

The by-roads of Forfar,

Somewhere the messenger of Tetragrammaton

Came amongst us, found the elders

Who were gathered, who were instructed

And there, the metal works

The furnaces of all time

Were assembled.

Though nothing remains of them now.

 © BH 2015

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This was the fourth in the poem series. It was indeed a place-name conundrum. Succoth and Soccach appear on the map not many miles out of Dalls (Scotland). I looked into the meaning. It got a bit biblical. Especially since we lived a handful of miles from the Angus village of Padanarum.

The picture is a wee but and ben out west, as it happens. My old friend Roy Wentworth told me it's a place so frequented by the wee folk that a visitor from Inverness (at least a centtury past) had to leave. She could get no sleep for their chattering. The cows are from several miles away, imported by pixels.

The sequence is Hollowed #3; Dusk; Bloodlines; Succoth; Boyhood; plus the bonus, Balance Wheel.