SELECTED
POETRY
by Heather Macleod

'DIGGER'

I buried you at the right-hand side of the front step.
So when you turned up years later, I was
surprised to say the least.
As I had been years before
when they told me to expect a digger
and I opened the door on you.
Ndigba my digger. It became your name and
fitted you like your bright clothes and toothy grin.
And now I dug in the mud to make sure
you were there in the hole
I put you in
by the door
to be sure of escape.
But you were having none of it �
you wanted to dance.
Not a day had passed
when you didn�t think of me, you said.
I did not trust that jovial face
Or the brown beauty beside you.
She dressed me like a tight tart.
It took an age.
By then you�d gone and I felt wrong
in her arm as we wound down that orange road that smelt
of dust and roasted maize.
We found you in the shanties
showing the growing crowd
your hip rolls and pelvic thrusts.
It all seemed quite indecent.
But you were in your element, your colours spun,
gyrating to the belafon.
My king of movement, juju dancer.
He�s the best, you know, I said
to no-one in particular.
But they heard nothing.
They were transfixed.

� Heather Macleod

Reproduced with permission

---

'BEINN BHURAICH'

From those hoary mounds where
plovers cry and autumn geese weave
skeins about the peaks,
trace the long bone of stone, where mica glints
and blood-red discs of lichen grow.
Follow the fleshy folds of hills, the vein
of river until you reach the velvet cleft
where limbs divide. Then
nuzzle into forests ripe and seedy.
Smell the sharp musk-scent of fox.
Here grasses weave the matrix of her body -
purple moor, wavy, spikes of sedge - and in
wet runnels marsh hair grows and tufts of sphagnum
tinged with pink. Ferns still stand
erect and sporey though frost has licked
their feathered tips and turned them gold.
Wait here a while.
Be caught by spiders� shroud
and fists of fungi, spectre-white and gilled like fish.
Lean deep
into the bronze and scarlet canvas
and feel
the pulse
of this Rubens mountain.

� Heather Macleod