I work and research as an ethnologist, curator, and educator in the Highlands, where I have lived since I was a teenager. I started writing poetry at home in Easter Ross in December 2020. Like many folk, I found myself needing a way to examine and express so many of the uncanny experiences of that pandemic time. Since then I have been fortunate to have had numerous poems published in journals, anthologies and exhibitions, in print and online, In 2022, I was Co-winner, with my wonderful co-author, Sinéad McClure, of Dreich’s ‘Classic Chapbook Competition’, awarded for our pamphlet 'The songs I sing are sisters'. My first full collection will be published by Drunk Muse Press in early 2024. Both opportunities are gifts from the generosity of folk in this deeply democratic community of poetry that I find myself part of. 

I’m Irish in Origin, but the Scots spoken here in the northern counties of the Highlands, and in Orkney and Shetland where I have lived and worked as a researcher, fills my ears and my imagination, and I find I introduce it along with Scottish Gaelic and the Irish my parents spoke, into so many of my poems.  Recently I’ve started composing whole poems in Scots – in the variety of dialects spilled into my ears by friends. It’s a very wee and humble contribution towards continuing to live and share forward this vital, vivid language of people and place, countering the narratives of marginalisation that have so often been wrongly associated with Scotland’s languages. See https://linktr.ee/caitjomac 

SHALDER

Cáit O’Neill McCullagh

Shalder spree this ebb
dintie shank dancer
every step a loosome meeracle
yer hoodie mirk a cannie guise
fer at the breist o ye is sic licht
beckon mah baleen-bleak been tae bliss
tae the ballat o yer beaky pecks
let me be aye happit in wonder at ye
in this tear of sleet-sun-blaw
as yun moon lifts from her bed of ware
wade yer waltz wi these sook-slappit waves
flit the watter then mak yer charge
braw peerie sea laeg-paddler
mah peedie Palaearctic oster kapper

mah peedie Palaearctic oster kapper
braw peerie sea laeg-paddler
flit the watter then mak yer charge
wade yer waltz wi these sook-slappit waves
as yun moon lifts from her bed of ware
in this tear of sleet-sun-blaw
let me be aye happit in wonder at ye
tae the ballat o your beaky pecks
beckon mah baleen-bleak been tae bliss
fer at the breist o ye is sic licht
yer hoodie mirk a cannie guise
every step a loosome meeracle
dintie shank dancer

shalder spree this ebb

Published in Poetry Scotland No. 103