an emigrant of no farewell

My mother emailed me and my sisters today to tell us a relative of ours--my great-uncle--died this afternoon. And I was shocked, because somehow along the way, I'd forgotten he was still living. I haven't seen or spoken to this man in something close to a decade, but he was an indelible figure of my early childhood--he lived in a converted barn next to my grandparents' farm, where I spent so much time growing up, and where we lived when my parents had ended up broke, evicted, or otherwise in trouble. I remember him scolding my four-year-old self for chasing his geese, remember the time I went with all the men of the family to shoot aimlessly into the ice of the pond behind his barn, the first and only time I've shot a handgun, and I how I was repulsed by the slick weight of it in my hand--I think I was ten, perhaps eleven? And I always played with his grandchildren, who lived in a trailer down the road, my second cousins. I don't know what's become of them, either.

The message reminded me of how far I've drifted from many of my relatives, and from my upbringing--not just in the trite sense of geography, but in the content and horizons of my daily life. This is part chance and part choice--the result of a conscious distancing, but also the outcome, possibly unavoidable, of all those different and discordant desires, the hunger that sent me off chasing after a different world, the reasons I never quite felt at home to begin with.

Last week I came across (having not reread it in some time) this poem by Kathleen Jamie--one of my favorite poets, and sadly unknown here in the States, although back in the UK she is fêted as one of the leading Scottish writers of this generation. I fell in love with her work the year I lived in Edinburgh, partly because I had also fallen in love with the Scots tongue--some of her poems (like "Bairnsang" and "Lucky Bag") are so heavily imbued with it as to be halfway incomprehensible to the average Anglophone reader, but this one isn't.

The Graduates

If I chose children they’d know
stories of the old country, the place
we never left. I swear

I remember no ship
slipping from the dock,
no cluster of hurt, proud family

waving till they were wee
as china milkmaids
on a mantlepiece,

but we have surely gone,
and must knock
with brass kilted pipers

the doors to the old land;
we emigrants of no farewell
who keep our bit language

in jokes and quotes;
our working knowledge
of coal-pits, fevers, lost

like the silver bangle I lost
at the shows one Saturday
tried to conceal, denied

but they’re not daft.
And my bright, monoglot bairns
will discover, misplaced

among the bookshelves,
proof, rolled in a red tube:
my degrees, a furled sail, my visa.

-Kathleen Jamie