3rd place in the 2020 Dunedin UNESCO Robert Burns Poetry Competition - unpublished poets section
1858
Duncan
‘I will not have this family scattered to the four winds.
Do something, Duncan!’ Bella - the day the oldest had owned
he was thinking of Canada. ‘There are not the opportunities
here for the young, we know,’ he said to his son.
‘You have brothers and sisters behind you. Give us time
to work it through. Maybe we will all go somewhere.’
The agent was from New Zealand. ‘The Otago province is a land
of freedom and possibility. A man with farming skills could start
working for others then work his way into a farm of his own.
That was a possibility that had not occurred to Duncan till then.
He was a skilled herdsman. In the long days on board ship he worried,
‘How much of his skill relied on knowing the land he worked on?’
‘The land is the unknown,’ he said to his oldest. ‘Aye,’ the young man replied,
‘but the sheep will be the same.’
Bella
She’d travelled some before marriage, to England once, Edinburgh.
Then one of her trips to Perth, led her all the way from Fife,
into the giant, gentle arms of Duncan Farquhar.
She can still feel the press of her mother’s embrace,
and urgent whisper tickling her ear, ‘Trust God. Live well, Bella.
No looking back. Your life is with your man now, and the bairns you raise.’
Smiling at her younger self and her mother now gone,
the 60 long miles from Kelty to Kenmore,
so little after 60 days at sea, and more to come.
She has left three of her babies in the graveyard by the Kenmore kirk.
The six surviving, 22 to 8, are all here, with her and Duncan.
Together. She draws Kathryn, the youngest, to her.
‘Come. I shall brush and plait your hair while you recite your psalm.’
To herself, ‘No looking back.’
Roddy
Fourteen years old, no longer a boy, not yet a man,
crammed with his older brothers in the forward steerage
with the single men, where you couldn’t drive a sheep
down the narrow gap between the benches and the berths,
and a raised arm would touch the boards of the deck above.
He was crook for the first two weeks. ‘Not got your sea legs yet, Roddy?’
Well, they could have him on, but n land he matched the best of them,
leaping surefooted across the mossed rocks by the burn.
He could pick a track up through the crags to return
a wandered ewe or heifer. Could be thick mist
and he would still find the way home. But he needed the firmness
of the earth beneath him. Whatever lay ahead in the new country
he was sure of this - there would be no more sailing ships
for Roddy Farquhar.