Better Than Starbucks!

When I am Old

Hie me to the hill-ground,

the high hill ground of Scotland,

to battle bladed wind-blasts

my forebears fought before me,

to stagger stammer-footed,

across the ancient highlands,

across their schists and drifting bones

across their shifting ruin-stones,

where, witchily, the gray pine crones

still call me to my history.

Leave me there to wayfare

the curlew-plainted wild moor,

to smell the sweet bog-myrtle

beside the peaty burn;

to stumble crumbling scree slopes

that roll with rutting stag roars,

and rediscover drove roads

and moss embossing lost abodes

where blood-fed drovers rested loads

bound south and trudging their return.

Let me find a lone shore

where fishermen lie buried

in graves of wave-flung flotsam

with neither name nor past:

to stand there like a Culdee

as mist-trails move unhurried

on island hills and holms and voes

where headlands creaked with yells of crows

as birlinns swooned in hell-bent blows

that heaved the shore and cleaved the mast.

Bear me to the black shed

where the blacksmith shod the plough-horse

to plod long narrow furrows

that pleat the folding field,

and when my storm approaches,

I'll stand before its raw force

by furnace flames of bygone ways,

and anvils ringing down the days

that forged my soul and bent these bays;

I’m of this land—it’s here I’ll yield,

to the stubble and seed of the past.

​

John Beaton writes metrical poetry and his work has been widely published in media as diverse as Able Muse and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He writes a monthly poetry page for the magazine Eyes on BC and served for four years as moderator of one of the internet's most reputable poetry workshops. He is a spoken word performer and a poet member of the band Celtic Chaos. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the 2015 String Poet Prize and the 2012 Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry. He was raised in the Scottish Highlands and lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.