MacFarlane’s Lantern: For the Scatterlings of Alba

Where memory is inheritance and presence is protest

On Tartan Day, I light a lantern for kin scattered by empire. A poem of grief, memory, and defiance—honouring the fragments that remain, and the quiet strength of those who remember, even in silence.

Introduction

It’s Tartan Day in the United States. The pipers are out, the kilts are pressed, the booths are set up to sell stories polished to a shine. I’ve stayed home. I’m writing. I’m grieving.

There’s a wee dram poured—my usual and customary—but it’s not enough today. Not enough to dull the ache in my chest, not enough to stem the flow of sorrow that this day seems to bring. It’s not just memory that hurts—it’s the layers. The weight of ancestral grief pressed against the contours of a life roughly spent. The weight of being trans and neurodivergent in a world that still demands compliance as the price of inclusion. The weight of knowing what this day could be—a day of remembrance, reconciliation, and renewal—and what it has instead been turned into.

I’ve spoken before about why I do not celebrate Tartan Day, why I refuse the pageantry of genocide repackaged as pride. But today, I needed a different language—older, slower. One that speaks not in argument, but in rhythm and breath. This poem, Lòchran Mhic Phàrlain, is a lantern lit for those of us still wandering. It is for the kinship that survives fragmentation. For those who remember, even in silence.

Lòchran Mhic Phàrlain

MacFarlane’s Lantern

I was not born in Arrochar,
but the land knows me still.
The wind off Loch Lomond carries names
my tongue was never taught to hold.
Tha mi à àite nach eil air mapaichean—
I am from a place not drawn on maps.
A place where being is enough.
Værensland.

They call us Clann Phàrlain nan Creach,
children of shadow, of mountain pass and midnight raid.
But they forget the why—
forget that hunger taught us to move like ghosts
through land that once knew our footprints as kin.

The lantern was not lit for conquest.
It was a signal to the scattered,
a quiet glow on moonless nights,
a promise whispered in the dark:
Tha thu fhathast beò.
You are still alive.

I speak with a borrowed voice—
static and broadcast,
gravel and grandmother’s laughter.
The BBC gave me syllables
when the world gave me none.
I am stitched together
from skipped frequencies and echo.

My name is exile.
My birth, a bureaucratic error.
A cradle misplaced.
A river misrouted to desert shores.
They took our names—
MacPhàrlain, MacAllan, Mac-an-abhainn—
burned them into census ash,
and called the silence “progress.”

But I found the tartan again,
not in ceremony, but in weight.
I wear it as a map of grief:
black for the mourning left unspoken,
crimson for bloodlines stretched but unbroken,
and green—
green for our connection to Alba,
to mòinteach and moss,
to the pulse of the earth beneath na beanntan.
We lived with the land,
not on it.
We breathed as part of the soil.

I am neurodivergent.
I am trans.
I am working-class.
I am of Cenél Mhic Phàrlain,
but I was never meant to inherit the story.
Still, the lantern burns.
In muscle memory.
In the tremble before speaking truth.
In the refusal to disappear.

So light it again—
for the separated,
the renamed,
the ones with two birthdays and no homeland.
For those of us still wandering between worlds.
For those who remember even in silence.
Cuimhnich air na daoine às an tàinig thu.
Remember the people you came from.

The lantern burns
not as pageantry,
but as prophecy.
Not as heritage,
but as belonging.

And still—
Seo a dhìonas mi.
This I’ll defend.

Final Thoughts …

This poem is a prelude to a longer piece I’ve been working on—an essay reflecting more fully on what Tartan Day means to me, and why I choose not to celebrate it. As an autistic gestalt language processor, the words don’t always come easily, but when they do, they arrive with the full weight of emotion. I’m giving myself time to honour that process. The essay will be published here in about ten days’ time, once I’ve had space to shape it with the care it deserves. Until then, thank you for sitting with this lantern beside me.