Poem

Kathleen Jamie

Side by side

The Wishing Tree

I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland

but in the fold
of a green hill

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood

because I hoard
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret assignation.

My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins

I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania.

Behind me, the land
reaches towards the Atlantic.

And though I’m poisoned
choking on the small change

of human hope,
daily beaten into me

look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.

Published with kind permission of the author and Picador (http://www.picador.com/).

Kathleen Jamie

(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1962)

Kathleen Jamie is a leading figure in a generation of distinguished Scottish poets that also includes Don Paterson, Robert Crawford, John Burnside, Roddy Lumsden and Jackie Kay. She was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1962, and grew up in Edinburgh, where she studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. Her poetry career got off to an early start when she received an Eric Gregory Award (for po...