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16 Aug 2023

Jay
Whittaker

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New Moon

To an Over Hailes
poet of 2123

After George Mackay Brown’s

To a Hamnavoe poet in 2093

                     Words humming in our heads – 

                                 mine scribbled in notebooks, 

                                             tapped into my phone,


                     typed up and sent, fat packets of data

                                 battling for bandwidth 

                                             along the copper wire. 


                     And you? I’m sorry, the forecast 

                                 is not good. I fear the sea 

                                             may be lapping at East Linton.  


                     We have vast fields down to Hailes Castle, 

                                 swathed with wheat, barley

                                             cabbages, leeks. Do you watch 


                     rooks and gulls, swirling, circling 

                                 in a cultivator’s wake? 

                                             Does anyone sit in the tractor cab?


                     The river, swollen with snow melt, 

                                 flooded the path again this year, 

                                             shrugged off its old shape,

  

                     the gentle pebbled slope churned to sand, 

                                 powder-soft underfoot, 

                                             a whole new waterline.

Behind the poem...

Written in the centenary year of Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, my poem is a response to his To a Hamnavoe poet in 2093 – one of his later works, published in his final collection, Following A Lark: Poems. Like Mackay Brown, I’m writing to an imagined poet a hundred years in the future: picking up on solastalgic themes, and rooting my poem in East Lothian’s agricultural landscape, where I spent a lot of time during COVID-19 restrictions.

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© 2025 Original Authors

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