The Immigrant

I cannot see him plain, that far-off sire
Who notched the first oak on this western hill,
And the bronze tablet cannot tell what fire
-Urging the deep bone back to the viking wave -
Kindled his immigrant eye and drove his will.
But in the hearthside tale his rumor grows
As voice to voice into the folk-chain melts
And clamor of danger brings the lost kin close
...The runes run on, the song links stave by stave.
I summon him, the man of flints and pelts,
Alert with gun and axe. The valley-rim
Uplifts the wanderer on the buffalo-path,
First of the host of all who came like him,
Harried from croft and chapel, glen and strath.
Now where the beech mast falls, no pibrochs wail.
The claymore rusts forgetting once how red
The dew lay at Culloden. Old feuds fail,
And nevermore the axe sings on the wall -
Since age on age we fled,
Since we together, Gael and Gaul,
Palatine, Huguenot, came in company
And washed the old bitter wars in the salt sea.

-Donald Davidson, from "The Hermitage"