A UFO Sighting Over A Scottish Field In 1956
I am in love with Nathan
who works the fields in the farm my da always said would run to nothing.
Nathan knows how to put the hayseed in my hair
bleached blonde by days in the sun, under the sky and twisted together
like the Don and the Dee. Nathan reads poetry and kisses the sentiments
of the Pastorals into my Makyne’s lips. I don’t want you to go, he breathes
against my cheek as I mount my bike in the lane.
It’s awfu’ pretty out the night, I tell him. The crickets will sing your name to me
all the way home. He grins at me like I have given him the sunset
like I hang a new star with every word I say.
Soppy girl, he says.
I barrel homewards down whispering lanes
with his stinging kiss on my cheekbone.
The bike beneath me was built to bear the weight
of a son, to bear the half-grown bones of
my brother, cut down
in a war I was too young to know beyond the bombs over Aberdeen
the silent fields with no men to work them
and the one time I ever saw my father cry.
The village changes its feathers fast; my da
says it isnae right that a girl with her mother’s curly hair
should wear it cropped, cropped
like her short troosers, should kiss
without shame her own Nathan, should ride fast down lanes
when the songbirds are roosting and the badgers are out.
In the rutted lanes, my wheels scarcely stutter
over the potholes, flying a half-inch above the dark earth.
Birds burst from the hedgerows and rise like Roman Candles
breathless wings erratic in the air. Around me
the fields stretch out golden-bellied in the late sun, and
in the rose-cheeked dusk, it’s possible to believe
that they belong not to man but to
grass-moth and girl.
Whoosh.
A wind rakes my hair from root to flaxen tip
and a dark shape cuts a smoke-strung line across the sky.
I freeze with my pedals at ten and two
hang for a moment, still in the evening air, as alarm-calls
rattle the grasses. The dark shape falls to earth
two fields over, halfway up a hill
and sends the small rabbits screaming.
My feet meet the ground and the bike
wobbles drunkenly as I stand and stare.
In the fair-haired fields of the Petrie farm
the shape rests awkwardly in a halo of smoke.
I am sure that Scotland has never seen its kind before
that my eyes were no more ready to see the black hull
than da’s were to see me drink cider
at the ceilidh in Nathan’s barn.
The summer sky above me stretches
unbroken once more, as if the heavens had not spat
a horror unknown at my feet.
The village lies west through woods and fields
maybe one-fourth of a mile from here.
I wonder will they fetch the snub-nosed fire engine
from town for this? Will the men go near
the smoking oddity or will they
leave it to rust among the rabbit-burrows?
Museums in Aberdeen
or in Edinburgh or London will pay me to bring them
what my eyes have seen and wished they hadn’t.
Newspapers will print my picture and people
I have never met will condemn me as drunk and simple
and Da will tell me that the black shape is nothing
but a seam in the clouds, a bolt from the blue
like the shell that killed my brother. Madness
like the upstart hands that held the scissors
as I cut my hair.
The hay-sweet air is beginning to thicken with tarry smoke.
I turn my bike in the lane, riding fast and frantic,
spitting pebbles and twigs from under the tyres
shaking like a sick child. There in the lane Nathan is running
towards me, and the bike coughs under me as I brake. I fly
to him, and as he starts to speak I finally catch
in my mouth my frightened breath.
Oh, God! Oh, God!
The world is ending!
Here, over God’s green fields
the world has widened and flown apart
and taken me with it, bike and all.
Feel my heart! It’s like a rabbit’s.
But I am not a rabbit. I did not run, Nathan.
I flew. I flew. I flew.
Daisy Harris, 05/2019
This poem is decidedly not based on a true story, however it was inspired by several. For full effect, alternate between listening to ‘Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois’ by Sufjan Stevens and ‘My Finest Hour’ by The Sundays whilst reading. Also, have a go at reading it in an Aberdonian accent 😉
Daisy Harris Poetry 