I’ve been reading the poems of J.O. Morgan, Scot, lately. And slowly. A page a morning, as is taught by a wise man I know.  The volume is titled Natural Mechanical (2008) and it “arrived out of the blue” to take the Aldeburgh first poetry prize.  The subject, Rocky, is a real man.  Morgan talks about him and the emergence of the book, here.  Since it is a narrative, a story told, it’s hard to bring just a piece to you, but this might do.

At home it’s the Gaelic that rolls from his tongue.
Although he need not speak it very much.

The language of streams, of rock, of wood–
of nettles, as taught by their strings:
that handled right can make a three-fold cord
yet firm enough to catch a full-grown hare
and hold it fast — is much more to his liking.

The tongue of the classroom is English

Read the words as you’ve been taught,
or you weren’t even listening.

As in a dream the letters stay as letters.
They are glue. Have no perspective depth.
Their shapes mean nothing other than their shapes.
Have no relevance to sound, to throat. Un-word-like.

We know that you’re not stupid,
A stupid child can’t hook a fish by hand.
You sisters aren’t stupid.

Suspicions are he might not be all there. Close.
Frustrated taunting blinds them to the link.

So when he shakes his head and does not speak
the teacher makes him wear a tall white hat
then stands him by the back wall of her class
–a remedy that’s always worked before.

Beneath the narrow cone the boy
thinks hard on what he has or has not done.

His own solution: NOT TO GO TO SCHOOL.

His teaching to be gathered from the earth.
From scrub and thicket: profit, never dearth.

from Natural Mechanical
J.O. Wilson, 2010, CB Editions