Summerdale

Someone's son from Caithness

Was slaughtered at the start -

No sorry slub for this corpse,

Splendid stiffening symbol of Scottish pride.

Thirty sons of Caithness sighed their last sighs

In the first onslaught at Summerdale.

An Orkney peasant paced home,

Practising pomp yet pale beneath the panache

Snatched from a Caithness corpse

On open heath by Orphir's hills - 

While four times thirty others died

In the retreat from Summerdale.

​

Memories of sadistic stories,

When she saw the stranger,

Aroused in a mother that malice

Reserved for prospective predators

Closing in on her young -

She would stand firm and have her Summerdale.

​

And she resolved to rid her Tuskerbister territory

Of a desperate man,

Surely defeated at Summerdale.

With her heart menacing body and soul,

Becoming an alien component within herself,

She waited for the soldier of Summerdale.

​

Magnus Erlendsson use your saintly powers

On this hovel's earthen floor :

Breathe life into a son of Orkney 

Stilled by a single blow from a stone-stuffed sock -

His mother took him for a Caithness mother's son

And he was the last to die at Summerdale.