Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician, and critic. He was born to a Gaelic-speaking, West-Highland Mother and a Punjabi-speaking Indian father who immigrated to Glasgow in the 1970s. He is currently working on a multiform music, poetry, and visual art project about the history and cultural memory of Vallay — a (now uninhabited) tidal island off North Uist where his grandmother lived.
Cailin Mo Rùin-sa (Reprise)
Crossing the Sound
she spoke of emigration
and hummed a song
—Cailin Mo Rùin-sa
her weathered hand,
salted with freckles
wrote phonetics
in my notebook
finite ink whispers
so rare, of flowers,
hills, and memories
beyond the mast
the last song from
the lastborn that
I didn’t know
I knew
Dearest my own one, oh won’t you be mine, Full of devotion, so modest and kind? My heart’s full of longing and yearning for you; Come close to me, darling, you know I’ll be true.
The Old Dictaphone
A stranger
upon landing
in a vast expanse
of salt-water lochs
torturous recesses
bogging seawards
rugged declivities
absolutely treeless
Here are only three
cottages, two of them
occupied by shepherds
and the other a tailor.
The Lastborn
Look up,
Look up!
fluorescene
fireplaces
burning
above
head
below
sky
the pigeons fly home
“I was asking about what age
you might have been when
you left”
This morning
an opalescent
egg sits brightly
on a roofless gable
—The Lastborn.
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