Nation?

Is this the name 

For the handful of dirt 

You are standing on?

And do you even name

Air or weather, your own face

Looking through one 

As you breathe the other?

What do you call geology

And its scoured landscapes

Or the sea whose clouds rise 

With rain to fill the lochans 

And the small, secret burns 

Running stone-deep and gullied 

Back to the sea again?

And whose story should we tell

In dark winter or simmer dim?

What name is your name

For our history and those 

Whose names are spoken in it,

Spoken of, spoken for, spoken 

By every lip and tongue.

Which of them echo most 

In the moss-bearded forest

Or in wild and uncommon grazings,

Mute with the grass still growing?

Too many words have run 

Like burn-water, a caochan of sound 

In the field margins; too many words 

For one story alone to be the one story:

All our twisting tales tell themselves 

Ear to ear and build the greater book 

Of our longing and belonging.

Nation?

What name can I say?

How could I add some -ism to the end of it 

And invent some faction of me and mine 

Where you and yours have no place?

I could never say,

This ground belongs to me,

No more than I could say,

The air is mine as I breathe it in; 

And mine again as I breathe it out.

© BH, 2018

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I’ll let it speak for itself. Nation. The question mark is for the vexed question of nationhood. Make of it what you will…

Just for good measure, though, you may think the symbolism in the illustration apparently Scottish. That’s as may be. And the faded map of Culloden field superimposed on the rock might seem to support it.

But the other elements were photographed in the USA, in Indiana, as it happens: the crossed contrails mimicking a saltire, the rock with the pine tree growing. In fact, that last shot was in a huge, disused limestone quarry in Bloomington, IN.

Nationhood. Sense of place. Could be just about anywhere.

Now there's 'Nationheid?' the same conundrum in Scots.