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Early Morning Train to Inverness, by Magi Gibson (poem)

from an t​-​Each​-​Iarainn [The Iron Horse] by Hamish Napier

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about

Says poet, Magi Gibson about her poem,

"I love travelling on trains, observing fellow passengers as they come and go, letting the mind drift off on its own imaginings as the countryside flashes by. I first jotted the notes that became this poem at a time when I often travelled alone to attend poetry readings or lead creative writing workshops. Months, or maybe even years later, I found all these disconnected, but striking images in my notebook. I liked them a lot, and I felt they captured that particular journey really well, so my next task was to form them into a poem. I chose the couplet form as it seemed each image was a ‘carriage’ with a different part of the view or experience, and I could then link them together in a way that pleased me. So the form of the poem too becomes in a sense a train. The making of the poem was also a journey of exploration. I’d no idea when I first made the notes that they’d evolve into a full poem.”

Hamish's words on this Poem:

My mother pointed this one out to me. It really puts you in the railway carriage. That feeling you sometimes get when you travel - an uplifting feeling of increased momentum and purpose in your life. And all the characters around about you from different ages and stages and works of life. I love it how Magi gets to work right away by mentioning the most striking things she sees out the window, namely the disgraceful electricity pilots of the Beauly to Denny Power Line that scars the landscape at Drumochter. The Highland will look back in embarrassment when those are finally taken down and buried properly under the ground as they ought to have been in the first place. It times like these that you realise we are still living in the past, just a slightly newer version of it, and that we have such a long way to go in learning how to care for landscapes we manage.

lyrics

POEM: Early Morning Train to Inverness Magi Gibson

from time to time snow sprinkles from the sky
the way flour sifts from a baker’s fist

grey steel pylons pose like giant girls
playing ropes

gorse, dark bottle green, bristles in scruffy tufts
on a badly shaven chin of hill

a woman in a suit tap-taps at her laptop
staring at the screen

scots pines turn their Presbyterian backs
on a stream that pishes like a drunk

a grey cloud weeps over patches of snow
pooled like milk in nooks and crannies

a lochan slate-grey bides her time, swollen-bellied
in February, her waters will break in March

a woman paints her nails, the air
grows thick with the reek of varnish

Slochd summit snow, a crumpled duvet
chucked on the chittering land

Look! Look! A red stag with forked lightning antlers
poses for a child’s pointing finger

a mobile phone skirls
Scotland the Brave

between peaks that rise like stony breasts
a yellow lorry carrying eggs, races the train

as packed like battery hens we hurtle on
towards breakfast and Inverness

credits

from an t​-​Each​-​Iarainn [The Iron Horse], released December 14, 2023
Poem by Magi Gibson

Recited by Hamish Napier

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Hamish Napier Grantown On Spey, UK

Hamish is a multi-instrumentalist and composer from the Scottish Highlands.

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