All of these things, very bright

Here in Scotland, the land is finally starting to emerge into colour once again, and the quickening rhythm of spring is doing what it always does to my brain. Expanded horizons. The soul-lifting glory of Scottish Alpine Spring. The promise of losing myself in the sleepy haze of mayglow. This is a time I’ve always found sombre – yet also intensely creative, perhaps because the advancing greenery is forever a memento mori in my mind. For me, joy and tragedy are marbled together as a kind of foundational instinct in this season.

The first family member I can remember dying was my grandmother on my mum’s side. Grandad Jack had died long before he was born, so I never knew him; his death was just a fact, associated only with only second-hand emotions. But my nana Kit died when I was eight. To be honest, my memories of her as a person are fuzzy and non-specific, but the emotions of that time in spring 1995 are clear.

I wrote a poem for her funeral called ‘Here Comes Spring’, and my cousin Nick read it out, alongside a recital of Wordsworth’s daffodils. I still have the yellowed index card with the poem written on it in my mum’s handwriting, and I remember her handing it to Nick before he took to the stand at the funeral.

Daffodils dancing with the breeze,
Herons fishing in the pond,
Buds growing on the trees,
All of these things, very bright,
Belong to spring.

This is the oldest of my poems to survive. Obviously it’s not very accomplished, but it’s become something of a touchstone for me: the primordial root of everything I’ve created since, because it was the first thing I’d written that sprang directly from a bulb of human experience and emotion.

More than 30 years later, spring 2026 has also been a time of change and emotional energy. So much seems to be moving at great speed this year – almost entirely in a good way. Hannah and I are in the process of buying a house, and this feels like a gateway period in our lives. But things are being shed even as other things are growing. We’re both 40 (well, I will be in a few weeks). Life presses on.

I’ve been spending what time I can in the forests and mountains, and the poetry has been coming easily to me of late. Here are two poems I’ve written in spring 2026. I hope they don’t come across as unduly sombre, but at the same time I believe something of the tension of this season comes across in the verse.

Formatting note: if the poetry lines below don’t look right viewed on a small screen such as a phone, try reading in landscape orientation to prevent the lines from wrapping.

An honour guard of thrashing pines, or so
I think at first. This path, a ruler quick
Through woods, is strafed by winds that charge unbound
From field to fell, the dogs of spring set free
At winter’s end. I feel them shove, unruly
But unseen, their paws of rain insistent –
If you should run with us, I hear them yap,
We’ll take you for a thrilling chase! But to
Each side, the woods – so quiet of late, the pines
Unscented, bracken draped in winter rest
On boulder urns – are raising up a roar,
A swaying indignation of the sort
That pines can stage so well. The dogs run on,
And quiet again the forest grows – perhaps
To snooze a month or more until the sun
Can overcome those sleepy yawns. There was
No honour guard for me, I realise now,
But at my feet I see a primrose bright:
A gift left shyly for the dogs of spring.
—Falkland, March 2026

A larch’s treasure. Needles hardly more
Than tips of softest light have thrust themselves,
Against all reason, through the twigian depths
Of April uniformity to catch
A crystal raindrop in their tender grasp.
This glinting gem in nest of green invites
Attentive eyes that seek their joy in quest,
And those who find their truth in symphony
Of self and nature. Yesterday I would
Have marched on by, my mind untethered from
Its home and wandering in another time,
But forest calls me back to warmth and rain.
The citrus burst of larch upon my tongue:
A bite of green for me, and of myself.
—April 2026, Glen Tilt (finished in Aviemore while waiting for a bus)

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