Settling

Marjorie Lotfi Gill was born in New Orleans and grew up in Tehran, child of an Iranian father and American mother, with the Iranian Revolution taking place in the background. Since then she has lived in Ohio, California, New York, and, for the past dozen years, Scotland. Her new pamphlet Pilgrim (Enterprise Music Scotland, £5) re-imagines her father’s journey from his homeland to America, where he had to work hard to gain a foothold in a land where everything from language to landscape was alien to him.

And so he becomes the man

who walks out into thunderstorms face turned up to the rain,

as if willing the lightning bolt to channel down through him, wishing,

if not for a shift in pattern (having lost faith in the shift

in pattern), then for breaking of this tree into two, another chance

to begin, this time as something useful, an object worked by

a different man’s hands: a ledge that safely bears the weight

of the precious, say, a feat he’s never managed; or a table

that displays its knotted faults as beauty, like a fist opened

to reveal stigmata, both humble and proud; or a chair, bent back

against its grain to an arc, the angle that best suits

another man.

You can find a copy of Pilgrim by Marjorie Lotfi Gill at the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. For poetry inquiries, e-mail reception@spl.org.uk or visit www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk