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The first receipient of the Mark Ogle Poetry Award, in February 2008, was Aonghas Padraig Caimbeul. He responded to Mark Ogle's poem 'English Rain' with three poems: 'Our Rain', 'Tocsaid-Uisge' (the water-barrel) and 'Grabhataidh' (gravity).
English Rain (Mark Ogle)
I want today to close with English rain
Tapping on my window in the four o'clock gloom.
I want Wellington boots, damp coats in a hallway
And to fight from a warm room against a screaming seawind
To the poached, puddled gateways of fields
Where mud flanked cattle wait at winters end for hay.
I want trousers soaked to the thighs
From walking through long grass
In fine misty rain that doesn't fall
But fastens glistening droplets to my clothes and skin
And to listen to the sucking sounds of meadows as they drain.
I want to come home early from work in the afternoon
Because of the rain and sit with a book by the fire
And hear the words, "Attention all shipping,"
And glimpse pale blue through broken cloud
And hear brown water running loud
Through the streets of the village
During a lull in a three day gale.
Today on this parched dusty plain
I want rain to start falling and not to stop
Until trees take such deep root they can only turn green,
As they begin to do in England now, thanks to the English rain.
Poems by Aonghas Padraig Caimbeul
Our Rain
Even on the wireless
we knew the difference:
those mild forces
down Dogger Bank way
getting gradually closer
until all heaven was let loose
west of the Hebrides.
And under the stars' light
we tweaked the knob
until all that crackle disappeared
east of Hilversum where,
out of the great wind,
America sang to us, O boy.
Our rain
was constantly horizontal
like a punch. It rattled off our zinc roof.
It ran like a river down my Dad's ronepipes,
gathering in a pregnant barrel, like the Red Sea.
Lochs and fields and puddles poured,
the ditches overflowed:
this was the world of the each-uisge,
possessed by splash and slurp and spray -
more sea than soil, more liquid than rock,
an endless, imminent Atlantic.
Later, in London,
warm rain fell
through a watery sky,
but in minutes all was dry,
as if life was temporary and brief
unlike the deluge of my childhood
memory, where all was wet from birth to death,
from the amniotic sac to the unquenchable sandy earth.
Tocsaid-Uisge
Bha tocsaid
aig ceann an taighe
a bhiodh a' slugadh an uisge
on phìob-tharsainn.
Bha an tocsaid sin
nas reamhra na duine sam bith sa bhaile,
a h-oirean a' cur thairis
le dìle shìorraidh nan speuran,
a brù ceangailte ri bannan-iarainn
cleas na cuiseid-chnàmhan
a bha cumail Seònaid Anna Sheumais ri chèile.
Ach fhuair sinn tap dhan taigh
agus chaidh an tocsaid air dholaidh:
tholl am fiodh, sgàin na bannan,
agus gu clis dh'eug Seònaid Anna.
Water-barrel
There was a barrel
at the end of the house
which would swallow the water
from the rone-pipe.
That barrel
was fatter than anyone in the village,
her edges overflowing
with the eternal downpour from the skies,
her belly tied with iron-bands
like the bone-corset
which held Seònaid Anna Sheumais together.
But we got a tap installed into the house
and the water-barrel went to rack and ruin:
the wood rotted, the bands burst,
and then suddenly Seònaid Anna Sheumais died.
Grabhataidh
Nuair a bha mi nam bhalach beag
ann an Sgoil Ghearraidh na Mòineadh
leugh mi gun deach balach Sasannach
a-mach aon latha
's gun do laigh e fo chraoibh
far an do thuit ubhal air a' bhathais, agus mar sin
lorg e grabhataidh.
'À hà', thuirt mi rium fhìn,
'Sin carson nach e Uibhisteach a fhuair e -
mura b'e gun do loisg na Lochlannaich
gach craobh bha ann an Uibhist,
bhiomaid ainmeil.'
Choisich mi dhachaidh às dèidh na sgoile
len t-uisge dìleach a' dòirteadh às na speuran,
mar sheann fhìrinn ro linn Noah 's Erik Ruadh.
Gravity
When I was a little boy
in Garrynamonie School
I read how an English lad
had gone out one day
and lay under a tree
where an apple fell on his head, and therefore
he discovered gravity.
'A hà', I said to myself,
'That's why it wasn't a Uistman who discovered it -
if the Norsemen hadn't burnt
every tree that had ever been in Uist,
we would have been famous.'
I walked home after school
with the rain as usual plummeting from the heavens,
an ancient truth in a pre-Noah, pre-Norse kind of way.
