16 April 2016

“The Diamond Pane”: a poem by Kathleen Jamie

"I, my mother’s daughter, / took up a pen, hard-nibbed / and therefore equal / to the task. . ."

In my “eyrie of freedom”,
that house of the mind, high
above a small Fife town
of fisherfolk and weavers,
I, my mother’s daughter,
took up a pen, hard-nibbed
and therefore equal
to the task, and etched my name
– my maiden name –
on a diamond pane of glass.

Through those same narrow
casements, closed tight
against Arctic winds, I beheld,
like a seer his weird sights,
ice-floes, death-pale, choking
the gold-fringed Firth, far-off
snow peaks, clouds chased on
by westerlies; and so there flew
from that falcon’s lair
my “airy imagination”:
I’d ramble over frozen fields
till sunset – so early! –
sent its roseate glow;
our fireside conversations
swooped through books, and hope and liberty.

That pane where I made my sign
– one of many admitting
a pallid light to a passage
of white closed doors –
was it marked like a card
with a fate which, unknowingly,
I’d chosen? In June,
when the “crimson midnight sun
skirted the northern horizon”
I bade my friends farewell, and climbed
the gangplank of the Osnaburgh
ready to sail south, and soon
again run to the warm south,
entering my “age of promise”.