Finding Ourselves at Brigadoon      

Our tour bus heads out of Edinburgh
across Scotland’s southern farmlands,
a light rain beating against the windows.
 
Our driver announces: “The ferry across
to Ireland is down but just for morning,
so we’ll take a special side trip.”
 
We are passengers on this voyage
and so settle back to what is next:
cows in a field, old factory towns.
 
My brother whispers across the seats
“We’re near County Ayr and the village
of great grandfather Cochran.”
 
A continent we’ve crossed
with our wives, to see this
place of our origins.
 
The rolling hills, the deep green fields
so like the Alleghenies where he
settled in Pennsylvania.
 
Ann sleeps at my side as we
glide through countryside
our guide telling of Scottish ways.
 
But soon the bus slows
into the town of Alloway
beautiful homes on quiet streets.
 
“And who is it that Scotland admires
as poet laureate above the rest?”
our guide asks and waits.
 
“Why bonny Bobby Burns, the Bard,
my friends; we’re at his homelands
here in lovely Alloway.”
 
The bus slows then stops and out the window:
a white stone house with long thatched roof.
“And here is where he lived and wrote.”
 
Beloved poet of great-grandfather Cochran,
my grandmother passed along old editions
of Burns’ poems to my brother and me.
 
I rise to take photos from the street
near a bright yellow laburnum tree,
my brother standing by our driver.
 
Home is written in all of this,
an echo in the heart here,
brought close before our eyes.
 
And none so dear and beautiful
as the bridge at Brigadoon, near
the cemetery where his parents lie.
 
I stand out on the roadway
above the river Doon, camera
pressed to my cheek and eye.
 
Sheep lie resting on the river bank,
near the stone bridge arcing perfect
across a quiet hillside.
 
Plants of deep purple and green
grow strong around the grey stone,
the river’s stillness deeper than sleep.
 
My breath deepens and slows:
to find self so far away,
to have touched and known.

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© Copyright, 2012, Larry Smith.
All rights reserved.