After the Skirmish in the Snowy Field, Patrick McKommie Asks
On 28 January 1673, Chief M’Comie Mor’s heir and next-best
son were killed by the Farquarsons, whose Chief was killed by M’Comie Mor’s
party. A plaque marks the place—still known as M’Comie’s Field—near Forfar, Angus,
Scotland.
What use are seer’s gifts? Of course I saw
The chase, the close, our riders strive and fall,
Their raiders strike and fall. I strove to see
Who luckless flinched, whose skill and bravery—
This happened many times, these feuding years
When Canlochan’s woods were neither ours, nor theirs.
Ours by purchase, under Cromwell’s law;
Theirs, when the seller’s King upended laws.
Was it my spells and prayers that steeled our clan
To fell the worst of the marauding Farquharsons?
Did their spells, or chance, in that field of snow-slick
stones,
Bring down our Chief’s two brave, outnumbered sons?
Still always in my seeing eye it seems
Canlochan’s woods were green: all seeds released
In swaying leaf, green tangles overhead—
But underfoot the trampled, seeping red.
Earlier M’Comie/McKommie poems appear in Innisfree Poetry Journal and
Shenandoahliterary.org
(Graybeal-Gowen 2012 Poetry Prize). Other poems appear in Calyx, Measure, Nimrod
(Neruda Award), Poetry, Potomac Review
(Poetry Prize), Prairie Schooner,
and her fifth book, The Habit of Fire:
Poems Selected & New. She has held NEH and Canadian Senior Fellowships, and in 2009 won
Maryland State Arts Council’s highest Individual Poetry Award. She teaches at
the Bethesda Writer’s Center, is on the Splendid Wake Committee, helps edit for The Word
Works, and arranges a poetry series at Kensington Row Bookshop in Kensington,
MD.
