Summer Poetry Pop-Up: Judith McCombs

Chief M’Comie Mor and the Kelpies

  

Kelpies are the shape-shifting water spirits of Scotland’s rivers. They take the forms of beautiful horses and hairy, water-weedy humans. Kelpies lure people out to drown them. 

   Glenshee, Perthshire, 1600s

There came a wailing at the door

That night of roaring wind.

O save my man, M’Comie Mor!

M’Comie, let me in.

The flood has swept my good man down,

Shee River runs so high.

There’s none but you can save him now,

O help or he will die.

Shee Water leaps like a wild, wild steed

There’s none but you can tame.

O leave your sleep and come with me

If M’Comie be your name.

The stars were dim, the moon was banned,

He probed the shifting mud

And waded out, his staff in hand,

To brave that raging flood.

A cry he heard, then saw a face

Rise like a thing half-drowned.

The Chief stood braced to pull it safe--

But it reared to stamp him down.

It was no man, but a kelpie-steed

Who carries off mere men.

He hurled his staff at the creature’s head

As the kelpie dove again.

Then the kelpie’s wife struck M’Comie’s side

With her flailing water-weeds--

In the pounding rain he hurled him free

While she joined her wave-born steed.

--Judith McCombs

Innisfree Poetry Journal; rpt. Clach of Clan MacThomas

Judith McCombs grew up nomadic, in a geodetic surveyor’s family. Her poems appear in Delmarva, Potomac & Saranac Reviews, Innisfree, Nimrod (Neruda Award), Poetry, Shenandoah (Graybeal-Gowen Prize); and The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New. She is active in Word WorksDC, Federal Poets; and arranges the Kensington Row Bookshop’s Poetry Readings.