The Spirit Glass

The Spirit Glass

We join our hands
Around the spirit glass
The sloshing winedark nectar
Warming our palettes in sunset
Amber textures of tavern night
Encroaching our horizons
The ancient liquid of our company
This sea that passes between us
The highlands and the islands
And the people of the coasts
Conjoined and divided
By ribbons of grey tumbling water
Seafarms and headlands
Chiselled once into a cup
That drank a single draught
Of Dalriada mead
Still entranced by the ghost of lights
Beckoning across the sound
And the spray of history rising
Like a Moyola gale of bitter salt
Blowing in from the north
To sober us
And cleanse our wounds
Tales of once bright champions
Calling to us beyond the land
In the screaming wheel
Of an arctic tern
Ten thousand years of kith and kine
An old, old people forgiving
As the cold waves that forged them
Fomorian and proud of it
Keepers of the elder mysteries
Peatsmoke rising over island distilleries
The oak spirit we gave the world
With his twin mistresses
Woman and song
This spirit glass
We raise in honour
Reflecting our upturned faces
In its depths
The great leveller
The warp and weft that weaves
The threads of an evening
Into the slow maturing garment of tale
Passing between us
In our common pleasure.