We’ll all go together

We’re interrupting our summer break for a poem on something miserably topical: Kathleen Jamie on our recent spate of wildfires

Last month I was in Grantown-on-Spey with a group of friends for our annual hillwalking week. The house we'd hired gave splendid views down over Abernethy forest to the Cairngorm hills. On the Monday, we climbed Bynack More, via the route that passed the green lochan, Lochan Uaine and Ryvoan bothy. On the Wednesday we went cycling. I stopped in a farm track to look across the river toward the hill we'd climbed. A plume of smoke was rising from the forest in the foreground. At that moment, the farmer arrived in his truck. He glanced at the scene through binoculars, and said "I presume someone has called that in?" Someone had. Very soon we heard sirens and fire-trucks.

Some of my friends are musical; they always bring guitars and a fiddle on our holiday. That evening, they were playing the corny old favourite, Will ye go, lassie, go? But over the musicians' heads I could see the ever-growing plumes of smoke and, as night fell, lines of flames rampaging across the hillside, the very place we’d walked.
How do we make a poetry of witness? Is that the best we can do? Is lyric, and linguistic cohesion appropriate, as we move into disintegrated times? Can poetry offer any resistance or redress? A piece written quickly has flaws: does that matter? All the questions. I felt duty bound to do something.

I wrote this quickly, and was struggling with the ending. Lines came in and lines went out. There was the idea of what we inherit and bequeath. Or squander and fail to pass on. It seemed that what was burning was our culture, as well as the forest. The securities my generation had known are all destabilised.

The song itself came to my rescue, giving me the last few lines. The Observer was good enough to publish it immediately. But already Dunwich Heath was on fire too, and god knows how much of Europe.

In the Cairngorms

We were coming down the mountain

under cloudless skies:

meadow pipits, iridescent beetles,

a lizard or two scuttering off

deep into the vegetation.

Such a hot afternoon, we were glad

to reach at last the myrtle-lined river

where we bathed. Such

were the certitudes we were born to:

here, a handful of crowberries,

there, up in the high corries,

snow-dabs that survived all summer...

And what bequeath? Little

perhaps, bar the old-school songs

we sang, late into the gloaming:

Will ye go, lassie, go...

In fact, we could sing that right now,

everyone knows the chorus:

We’ll all go together...

but the mountain thyme is in flames,

and our bonny purple heather.