Who am I?
Of what importance is a single human life to the billions that swarm our planet?
To all but a handful of those billions, none, none at all.
And so I, along with thousands of others, irrelevant and unknown to any but my closest kin in the scheme of Earthly things, was born and raised in mid-twentieth century Scotland near a wide river once the birthplace of great ocean-crossing ships; born to the joy of my mother and the pride of my father; born into the arms of loving parents and at once into the cold and heartless embrace of a dying empire; an insignificant cog in a rusted imperial machine.
I was born a Scot - a small link in a long line of Scots reaching back a thousand years and more. A line, on one side heirs of Somerled, Dominus Insularum, First Lord of The Isles, and on the other, descendants of the ancient kings of Ireland.
I am a product of the merged early peoples of Scotland through the convoluted twists and turns of love and fate across long centuries.
Who am I?
I am an ordinary Scot; and as such am a great and noble spirit descended from the foundational truths of myth and legend; a soul in search of its divine origin; a soul wandering a cold, lonely universe seeking the warming company of its siblings and, ultimately, a return to the loving embrace of its creator.
After discovering the online Dictionaries of The Scots Language (Dictionars o the Scots Leid) I was driven to string some Scots words together in the hope I might convey a sentiment in the form of a poem written in the leid of the Scots.
This poem, ‘Quait Voyce’, is what I arrived at, and is my first attempt at expressing a poetic sentiment in Scots.
On browsing the DSL I realised that buried beneath the weight of a ‘foreign’ language, that of English, lay hidden the quietened voice of a language I must have heard while still a foetus absorbing the sounds emanating from a strange external world that I was yet to be born into.
It was to become the language, the greater part anyway, of my childhood; my use of which fell away as I entered adulthood and was forced to converse with others who would not have understood the speech of that child I was leaving behind.
The Scots words I use come from various parts of Scotland and from various times in the language’s development. Scots is a broad, deep and emotive language capable of expressing many aspects of the soul in ways both moving and humorous - and in my opinion is a far more ‘human condition’ oriented language than is English.
Scots is also a language that might have been created for the benefit of poets, such is its power to express thought and emotion and sentiment.
I hope that my first meagre attempt is worthy of its splendour.
Northcode, August 2024
No spam or ads, just the latest posts and updates from Scotland's newest pro-independence blog.
.png)
