When I was a child the story of the Pied Piper, who lured the children of Hamelin out of town and into the side of a mountain, from which they never appeared again, held a dark fascination. Typing that last sentence out made me realize that it still does. The piper with his irresistible tune, the children who willingly followed, the finality of the mountain closing behind them: something about that story is enchanting in an awful way. This poem, which feels translated from a long-ago time (even though it’s not), brings me right back to the feeling that those old legends and fairy tales –the Grimm versions, not the sanitized Disney versions, conjures up in me.
The Hinds
– Kathleen Jamie
Walking in a waking dream
I watched nineteen deer
pour from ridge to glen-floor,
then each in turn leap,
leap the new-raised
peat-dark burn. This
was the distaff side;
hinds at their ease, alive
to lands held on long lease
in their animal minds,
and filing through a breach
in a never-mended dyke,
the herd flowed up over
heather-slopes to scree
where they stopped, and turned to stare,
the foremost with a queenly air
as though to say: ‘Aren’t we
the bonniest companie?
Come to me,
You’ll be happy, but never go home.’
For more about Kathleen Jamie, please click here.
Alison McGhee 