Poems and artwork taken from The MacDiarmid Memorandum
By Alan Riach
Paintings by Alexander Moffat and Ruth Nicol
Published by Scotland Street Press

The learning

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures,
Great and small,
All rainbows’ colours, storms and showers,
All things that rise and fall –
Stones and mountains, rivers, seas, and oceans far between,
Heather moors and hillsides, squat bushes, trees so tall –
The languages we use and are, to say that’s there, to point,
Or else to tell us who we are, the call
Of others, company, communities of selves,
And differences marked between, what voices are, and all
Such annotations, permutations, collocations mean
Is what we learn from womb to coffin’s floor and wall
Of earth or water, fire or air, we give what bodies as we have,
Surrender them, at last. This ball
Of earth, the sphere, the globe, the knowledge thus acquired
Is what’s forever, always here, evolving into what’s desired,
And taking forms to do so, in an age of revolutions.
So many kinds of learning are the only real solutions.
Resolve and resolutions, complexities, collusions,
Relax: and we achieve what comes, inevitable life. We’re stuck
With it, for that’s what learning is. It comes to us, with luck.

Ruth Nicol, ‘The Ewes and the Esk at Langholm’ 2014

Winter

White winter, ice and snow all over
Everything, the road, though, still, to be discerned,
Traced, tracked, leading us out, welcoming
The visitors, air in the throat, in the lungs,
Cold, ragged, emitted in clouds from the singular
Personal breath, the aural world of frost crunch
Grass bent down in white weight, rustling, all things
Hardened and requiring the resistance of the body,
Its warmth, wrapped up in wool, with only the eyes
As sharp as what they see, what must be seen
And so, preserved, protected, or moved into, changed
Forever into something better. All this landscape
Is the winter mind, filled with the strength of the living,
Balanced on movement and residence, in this endless open air.

Ruth Nicol, ‘Winter Road to Biggar’ 2021

Tait’s MacDiarmid

Piano notes, forthright, and chords, both bold and curious,
then song, a voice, a Scots voice, opening the air.

And in the air, there, also, there is The Voice of the BBC
on radio waves, the information, properly, official and approved –
(beside the books of poems, information, unofficial, edged, the wedge) –
a radio, newspapers, poems and songs:
What might you do, unorthodox,
against time and within it, measured and spontaneous, delicate and strong?

The vision moves
along the clocks where they sit on the mantlepiece,
as their long and short hands move, around, then the vision moves
back along the other way,
and it slows you down to see that:
time moving, the fire in the hearth, burning, the grate,
and there, in the light on the shelves by the window,
the pot plants growing in their earth containments.

A man on the edge of a pavement,
on the rim of the squared slabs, balancing between
the raised stone platform by the road and
all its passing traffic, then stepping up and
walking on a wall, or down a set of stone steps,
stepping, down, leaning, swaying, then weighing back,
going down to the edge of the sea, by the rippling waves,
the dark encroaching waters of the sea, the man
throwing stones into the sea –

A glimmer of laughter, a ripple of his shoulders,
neck down, head dipped, a dodge, a piece of cheek
or mischief, disguising an accomplishment unspoken.

The door to the house opens.
He goes in. The door closes.

The thick carved wooden knocker is there
on the outside of the closed door.

The light goes on through the window,
the curtains are open – there is the unseen,
there is the invitation of the visible –
The multitude of books, inside!
The film by which we see them.

Alexander Moffat, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid Brownsbank’ 1978

The MacDiarmid Memorandum by Alan Riach is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £9.99.