This poem is about the funeral of the mother of one of my very best friends. The funeral was not far from Kyle of Lochalsh on a sun-filled spring day. Everything was as described – even the two sea eagles. Indeed two sea otters playing in the sea the next day didn’t get into the final draft! Donina was just over one hundred. Her clan crest is a cat’s paw but she was a very gentle woman. I felt privileged and moved to be there, and to play the fiddle as the mourners arrived.

I played slow airs as folk stepped into the barn.
I had a seat at the back, not wanting to impose,
And also to gain the warmth of a log-burning stove.
The room settled, I laid down my fiddle, and the minister rose.
In front, your hundred-year body in a coffin dressed in the crest of your clan,
Beyond, framed by a sun-splashed window, Loch Alsh.

The minister spoke of things he must, then paused and said:
‘Time’… ‘time’… ‘time’… ‘time’
He stretched out the word each time to be the thing itself.
He said: ‘what matters is outside time’.
I wondered if he meant kindness, and hope, and love;
All perfectly in time but not part of time.

My eyes rested on people I sat among.
Highland funerals are somber affairs;
Dark ties, and suits, and polished shoes.
But there were also the colours of tartan;
The blackness of deep pools, purple heather and green bracken.
Tweeds were flecked with grass and peat.
In cities we have forgotten how
To dress in the colours of the places where we live.

After, you were carried from the barn
On the shoulders of family,
Your grandson, my godson, played the pipes
As you were laid in your grave
In the garden you loved, beside the man you loved.
Two sea eagles, laying claim to this place, flew above.

Later that evening, the moon rising,
With just close friends and family left,
Before foxes flexed their muscles
I went with some of the younger men
To shovel earth on your coffin
At once covering and revealing your final resting place.
The four shovels had the rhythm of a pipe march
As they laboured in turn.
Time, time, time, time.

The next morning your son and granddaughter
Planted a rose on the newly turned earth.