seven anglian spells

SEVEN ANGLIAN SPELLS ANDREW McCALLUM q a r r t s i l u n i Words of Power January 2010

i

aairvhous

the house appointed for judgement marked by an arrow bearing certain signs to assemble the multitude a decisive place where we lieutenants add our arrows to that of the headsman pushing them into the soft belly of the earth to signal our kinship planting a henge that shall over time grow into chapels and parliaments the house appointed for judgement two or three men clad in the pelts of beasts heads close conferring on a skyline

ii

aaron's beard

a charm against enchantment a cure for bad milk a sprig placed in the milk pail before milking afresh a sprig hid with cunning from the priests about one's person against their malignancy

iii

adderstane

earth baked hard almost glass a bead a lentil an unnatural device disguised by name and allegory to protect against the uncanniness of nature

iv

adhantare

an ancestor who haunts a place with his absence empty boots by the fire a rigg run to seed dried spittle on the stem of a pipe unsoftened by raw gums

v

adience

to give room as to a drystane dyke not to confine it in its extent as it tracks the hills but to set the land fitly matching it duly putting it handsomely together

vi

ae-peyntit gairss

blades sharper and more unyielding than the meadow-grass pasture that slits the throats of sacrificial beasts sedge that stands like sentinels guarding the aairvhous

vii

afterwald

land taken in from the forest stolen domesticated like the dogs that scavenge our touns accepting sometimes a kind hand a docile word that warn the approach of our enemies yet slink back to the wilderness when the spirit takes them

Andrew McCallum is a widely published and award-winning poet from southern Scotland.

The countryside around his home is littered with relics of his forebears, who speak through them from as far back as mesolithic times, and with whom Andrew strongly identifies in his poetry.

Heideggerian in temperament, Andrew is convinced that language is constructive of the world inhabited by the language user; hence the incantatory or ‘spell-like’ character of the old Anglian words he casts in this poem.

Dave Bonta