'Leave me. I have no time for your lost gods.'

‘Raaga Tree’, from Moder Dy by Roseanne Watt

Christmas Eve, 2020, written in a sleepless state.

Sometimes the only way to survive life is to dismiss the things you cannot comprehend. Shetland poet Roseanne Watt’s line is a dismissal of what once was, the speaker’s former self. It is a strange self locked into a strange poem. ‘See, I was brought here by storms,’ she tells us, and I’m reminded of Viola washed up upon the shores of Illyria in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The only thing to do when you are feeling strange is to push on through it —- to plot your way out of that peculiar spell with yourself.

I feel strangest when I don’t sleep, as though I’ve suddenly shed several emotional skins. Last night I was kept awake by the sound of the river rising. A flood was on its way, and everyone else around me on the river was away too. I spent my sleepless night reading the poems in Moder Dy and teaching myself snatches of Shetland or Shaetland as its properly called. I got as far as ‘du’ for ‘you’ and ‘Aert’ for ‘Earth’, and then these lines:

Laeve me.

I hae no time

fir dy wilt gods.

My boughs

sanne be

gallows here.

The first two lines you can hear through standard English; but the lines that follow on are more perplexing and I had to read them several times over. I made some sense between ‘wilt’ and ‘boughs’, although boughs don’t wilt -- flowers do -- but both are forms of organic or arboreal life. And then ‘gallows’ and ‘bough’ lead me to think either of the tree of life or the wooden cross upon which Christ was hanged.

Then I cross through ‘boughs’ to get to ‘gallows’, two lines down, at a slant across the line. They half-rhyme, as do ‘gods’ and boughs’:‘o’s and ‘s’s’ are mounting up. In fact, there are several partial rhymes here, but ‘gods’ and ‘boughs’ also eye-rhyme, and so these two words stick in my mind to produce a strong combination. Gods, I think, gods in trees; gods hanging from the gallows like the thieves strung up next to Christ. Tree gods. God incarnate, Christ again.

My sleepless self also feels a bit strung up too, as though she’s shedding skin moment to moment, getting thinner on the surface because she can’t go for that deep swim she longs for. I start to get what my mother called ‘scratchy.’ Difficult. Internally lost.

Watt’s speaker is curt, cross even. ‘Leave me,’ she says. ‘I have no time for your ‘lost gods’ (in Shaetland it is ‘wilt gods’, behind which I see and hear, ‘dead, dried out, lost and gone and over, dead and done’, because I’m still thinking of flowers. But leaves also wilt; anything green wilts and falls).

Despite what I say about dismissing things you cannot easily comprehend, I'm drawn to this strange language. It sounds like old German or Norse to me. Roseanne Watts tells me that the Shaetland language is a ‘fraught mix of English, Lowland Scots and Old Norn, an extinct Scandinavian language of the isles’. This a language that has come by sea, now dismissed by most in the modern world. I like ‘sanne be’, which is simply ‘shall be’. ‘Shall’ is full of authority. ‘It shall come to pass that . . . ‘ the prophets speak in this way: full of confidence. Therefore it shall come to pass, that as all good things are come upon you . . . (Joshua 23:15) I shall leave you with that.

For Meg, who first gave me these strange lines.