scottish

342d

Against the Croak for Doom: Hamish Henderson’s Vision of Freedom
28 Oct, Clydebank – free

Corey Gibson on the “anonymous song poetry of Scotland” & the “comradely solidarity of the anti-Fascist struggle” in the life & work of the poet, folklorist, & radical Hamish Henderson (1919–2002)

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/against-the-croak-for-doom-hamish-hendersons-vision-of-freedom-tickets-1756445268079

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #HamishHenderson

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344d

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD by Robert Louis Stevenson, with Stuart Campbell
12 Nov, Blackwell’s South Bridge, Edinburgh. Tickets £3–12

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD – a rollicking tale of highwaymen, murder, mayhem and doomed love – is one of fourteen works RLS left unfinished. Acting as a literary sleuth, Stuart Campbell has taken it upon himself to complete the unfinished tale.

@bookstodon

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-great-north-road-by-robert-louis-stevenson-with-stuart-campbell-tickets-1680543664339

#Scottish #literature #RobertLouisStevenson #HistoricalFiction

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328d

Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) died #OTD, 17 Oct, aged just 24. Notable for his poetry in both Scots & English, his works include “Auld Reikie”, “The Daft Days”, & “Hallow Fair”. His legacies are broad, from the literary & cultural to the medical.

1/5

https://robert-fergusson.glasgow.ac.uk

#Scottish #literature #poetry #18thcentury #RobertFergusson #Scots #Scotslanguage

A head and shoulders portrait in oils of Robert Fergusson by Alexander Runciman (1736–1785). Runciman has painted his friend, a young poet, lost in creative thought. His exaggerated features – huge eyes, full lips – suggest brilliance and intensity.

Edited 328d ago

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148d

Oh to be at Crowdieknowe
When the last trumpet blaws,
An’ see the deid come loupin’ owre
The auld grey wa’s…

—Hugh MacDiarmid, “Crowdieknowe”
from Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poetry (Carcanet, 2004)

🎨 : “Crowdieknowe”, by Catriona Campbell (b. 1940). Oil on canvas.

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781857547566/selected-poetry/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #painting #art #visualart

Crowdieknowe
Hugh MacDiarmid

Oh to be at Crowdieknowe
When the last trumpet blaws,
An’ see the deid come loupin’ owre
The auld grey wa’s.

Muckle men wi’ tousled beards,
I grat at as a bairn
’ll scramble frae the croodit clay
Wi’ feck o’ swearin’.

An’ glower at God an’ a’ his gang
O’ angels i’ the lift
– Thae trashy bleezin’ French-like folk
Wha gar’d them shift!

Fain the weemun-folk’ll seek
To mak’ them haud their row
– Fegs, God’s no blate gin he stirs up
The men o’ Crowdieknowe!

“Crowdieknowe”, by Catriona Campbell (b. 1940). Oil on canvas. Three angels, all pale, bald, and androgynous, stand wearing knee-length robes in the middle of a cemetery. One holds a book, and points forward, looking up quizzically. One holds a long trumpet slightly protectively. One gestures downwards towards a man who is hauling himself out of the ground using a golden cord wrapped around the angel's waist. Around the angels, naked men and women are pulling themselves out of their graves, gesticulating at the angels. In the background, more angels fly in while more naked figures clamber over the cemetery wall.

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343d

Today, 2 October, is National Poetry Day in the UK. The theme is “play”.

“Necessity is not the mother of invention; play is”
—Ian D. Suttie

It gets late early out here
in the lacklustre places,
wind in the trees and the foodstalls’
ricepaper lamplight, fading and blurred with rain…

—John Burnside, “Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012”
published in BLACK MIDDENS: New Writing Scotland 31 (ASL, 2013)

https://poetrysociety.org.uk/projects/national-poetry-day/2025-play/

#Scottish #literature #nationalpoetryday #play #poem #poetry

John Burnside
Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012

“Necessity is not the mother of invention; play is”
—Ian D. Suttie

It gets late early out here
in the lacklustre places,
wind in the trees and the foodstalls’
ricepaper lamplight, fading and blurred with rain,
the wire fence studded with fleece
and indelible traces
of polythene wrapping; marrowfat clogging the drains
on the road that runs out to the coast
then disappears.
A last bleed of gold in the west, like a Shan Shui painting,
then darkness.

The animals are gone
that hunted here:
wolves coming down from the hills, that
immaculate hunger,
rumours of bear and cat, quick
martens and raptors.
The rain is darker now,
though not so black,
oil-iridescent, streaked with the smell of lard
– it gets late early out here; though late, out here,
has a different meaning:

stars in the road
and the absence of something more
than birchwoods or song,
pallet fires, tyre-tracks,
grubbed fields clouded with grease
and palm oil, hints
of molasses and lanolin, tarpaper,
iron filings.
A narrow band of weather on the road,
then houses; though we scarcely think of them
as that.

I remember a meadow at dusk
in another rain
(and this is nostalgia now); I remember
I stood in a wind like gossamer and watched
three roe fawns and a doe
come quietly, one by one, through the silvering grasses,
wary, but curious, giving me just enough space
to feel safe,
their watchfulness reminding me of something
lost, a creaturely
awareness I could only glimpse

in passing.
That meadow is gone, and dusk
isn’t dusk any more
– or not out here –
just miles of tract and lay-by on the way
to junkyards and dead allotments,
guard dogs on tether,
biomass, factory outlets,
the half-light of ersatz dairies petering out
on rotting fields
of rape and mustardseed.

We’ve been going at this for years:
a steady delete
of anything that tells us what we are,
a long
distaste for the blood warmth and bloom
of the creaturely: local
fauna and words for colour, all the shapes
of ritual and lust
surrendered where they fell, beneath a fog
of smut and grime and counting-house
as church, the old gods

buried undead beneath the rural sprawl
that bears their names, or wandering the hills
of Lammermuir and Whitelee, waiting out
the rule of Mammon, till the land returns
– with or without us –
chainlink going down
to bindweed, drunken
thistles in a sway
of wind and goldfinch on the dead estates, fat
clusters of moss
and gentian, broken

tarmac with new shoots
of coltsfoot breaking through
like velvet, till the darkness of the leaf
unfurls into a light we could have known
but failed to see
by choosing not to find
the kingdom-at-hand:
this order;
this dialectic;
this mother of invention,
ceaseless play.

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343d

Tha i mar bharaille de sgadan saillte:
chan eil agad ach do chròg
a stobadh ann, agus dòrlach a thoirt a-mach,
reamhar is tiugh leis a’ bhuntàta…

—Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul, “Bàrdachd”

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/bardachd/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Gaelic #Gaidhlig #NationalPoetryDay

Bàrdachd
Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul

Tha i mar bharaille de sgadan saillte:
chan eil agad ach do chròg
a stobadh ann, agus dòrlach a thoirt a-mach,
reamhar is tiugh leis a’ bhuntàta.

Stob
an t-ìm na mheasg
agus tha cuirm agad: Eliot is Donnachadh Bàn,
le do làmhan rùisgte. Seachain
forca is sgian: fàg sin aig na sgoilearan.

Nuair a thig thu gu bonn a’ bharaille
sgròb na craicinn ri chèile,
dean ràth chnàimhean,
lìon lannan
‘s tilg sin thairis
dìreach mu àm reothairt.

Ma ghlacas tu adag,
thoir leat i: nuair tha an sgadan
gann, nì easgann fraighte fhèin a’ chùis
san acras.

Poetry
Translator: Angus Peter Campbell

It’s like a barrel of salt herring:
you only have to stick your paw
in, and lift a handful out,
thick and juicy with the tatties.

Pile
the butter in the middle
and you have a feast: Eliot and Duncan Bàn,
eaten with your bare fingers. Don’t use
a knife and fork: leave that to the scholars.

When you reach the bottom of the barrel
scrape the skins together,
make a raft of bones,
a net of fine filament,
and fling it over the side
just after the spring tide.

If you catch a common haddock,
take it anyway: in the absence
of a fat herring even eels
taste fine when deep-fried.

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343d

“I’ll nae longer tolerate this climate of wholesale copulation, it’s costin me a fortune! And I’m tellin yow I’ll no huv ye footerin wi ma chauffeur, cos the place is gone tae hell and there’s a leemit tae ma forebearance!”

—from “Mr Puntila & his Man Matti” (1999) by Peter Arnott, translated from Bertolt Brecht
Published in SERVING TWA MAISTERS: Five Classic Plays in Scots Translation

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/serving_twa_maisters/

#Scottish #literature #Scots #Scotslanguage #Scotstober #drama #theatre #translation

PUNTILA (Yells) Get them oot! (To EVA) I’m absent fer hauf an hour and the hale place gangs tae buggery. Aye, weel dae yow ken how come the cuddies are in ma claver? Cos the stableman’s shaggin the gairden quean, that’s how come. And how’s thon fourteen-month hutheron got baggit afore her time? Cos the lassie’s joab it is tae mind ma cattle is mixin her moggans wi the prentice boy, which disnae gie her leesure tae ensure ma prize bull isnae lowpin oan ma hiefers and committin random fornication wi onythin oan four legs, that’s how. Mind me tae huv a word wi the wee gairden quean, gin she’d kindly abstain from lowsin her scanties for five minutes, mebbe we’ll huv some tomatoes this year. There’s money in tomatoes, and I’ll nae longer tolerate this climate of wholesale copulation, it’s costin me a fortune! And I’m tellin yow I’ll no huv ye footerin wi ma chauffeur, cos the place is gone tae hell and there’s a leemit tae ma forebearance!

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343d

Something near to true
night-darkness. The children
are playing the Plinky-Boat –
a xylophone made
from a reclaimed yoal –
built for flexibility in a coarse
sea…

—Jen Hadfield, “The Plinky-Boat”
published in BYSSUS (Picador, 2014)

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/jen-hadfield/byssus/9781447241102

#Scottish #literature #Shetland #NationalPoetryDay #poem #poetry #play

The Plinky-Boat
Jen Hadfield

‘the present is a fine line […] a puff of air would destroy it’
—Gaspar Galaz, ‘Nostalgia de la Luz’

Something near to true
night-darkness. The children
are playing the Plinky-Boat –
a xylophone made
from a reclaimed yoal –
built for flexibility in a coarse
sea, you can tell it fledged
with ease, just blushed
from boat to instrument,
transpiring streams
of these hoarse night-
notes. For its copper pipes
are cut to breadth exactly
so the boat’s beam is
its sotto voce and two rills
of rising pitch run
into stern and stem to
the harmonic of each
hinnyspot – the point
the boards of gunwales
and stem flow together.
I don’t know what it is
about this place that things
metaflower so readily
into their present selves.

The instrument’s a boat,
the notes unresonant
and discs of thin light
swarm over the pipes
from the boys’ headtorches.
Perhaps we heard seals
broaching in the harbour
as they answered the girls’
handclapping game –
I doubt they moaned
in their haunted wise –
here was everything –
words lost, as I’m trying
to say, their echo, that
yodel into past and future.
The poem wouldn’t exist,
but we couldn’t stay.

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343d

“Frank Quitely is widely celebrated in the comics world, but far less attention has been paid to how deeply his work engages with the cultural, historical, & visual identity of Glasgow & Scotland”

Drs David John Boys & Julie Briand-Boyd, on the University of Leuven Press blog

https://lup.be/2025/06/david-john-boyd-and-julie-briand-boyd-superhero-comics-and-scottish-identity/

#Scottish #literature #identity #comics #comicbooks #illustration #FrankQuitely #Glasgow #Scotland

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277d

Profs Sally Mapstone & Dauvit Broun explore the St Andrews Chronicles – one of Scotland’s most important historical works – tracing the manuscript’s journey to St Andrews & its significance for understanding Scottish identity, legacy & nationhood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ck7zxfVxA

#Scottish #literature #history #BookHistory #16thcentury #manuscripts

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327d

Wanting to go,
all the leaves want to go
though they have achieved
their kingly robes.

Weary of colours,
they think of black earth,
they think of
white snow…

—Norman MacCaig, “Autumn”
published in The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Birlinn, 2009)

https://birlinn.co.uk/2022/10/21/poem-of-the-week-autumn-by-norman-maccaig/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #NormanMacCaig #autumn

Autumn
Norman MacCaig

Wanting to go,
all the leaves want to go
though they have achieved
their kingly robes.

Weary of colours,
they think of black earth,
they think of
white snow.

Stealthily, delicately
as a safebreaker
they unlock themselves
from branches.

And from their royal towers
they sift silently down
to become part of
the proletariat of mud.

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327d

Autumn, and the nights are darkening.
The old lady tells us of her past once more.
She muses on the days she spent nursing

at ten shillings a month…

—Iain Crichton Smith, “The Old Lady”
published in NEW COLLECTED POEMS (Carcanet, 2011)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781857549607/new-collected-poems/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #autumn

The Old Lady
Iain Crichton Smith

Autumn, and the nights are darkening.
The old lady tells us of her past once more.
She muses on the days she spent nursing

at ten shillings a month. ‘And what exams!
I could understand anything in those days.
What summers we had then, what lovely autumns.’

And so I imagine her cycling to her work
among the golden leaves, down avenues,
to hospitals which were disciplined and stark

with hard-faced matrons, doctors jovial
with an authority that was never quizzed,
while grizzled Death suckled at his phial,

and autumn glowed and died, outside the ward,
and girlishly she saw it fade in red
in sky and sheet, and evening was barred
with strange sweet clouds that hung above the bed.

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327d

“A man’s a man for a’ that” – how does he know?
Traipsing with his plough, the rural hero,
Swaggering down the lea-rigs, talking to mice…

—“James Macfarlan”, by Edwin Morgan
published in VIRTUAL & OTHER REALITIES (Carcanet, 1997)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781857543476/virtual-and-other-realities/

#Scottish #literature #Scotstober #poem #poetry

James Macfarlan
by Edwin Morgan

“A man’s a man for a’ that” – how does he know?
Traipsing with his plough, the rural hero,
Swaggering down the lea-rigs, talking to mice,
Sweating his sickly verses to entice
Lassies he’d never see again, strutting
Through the salons in his best breeches, rutting
In a cloud of claret, buttonholing
Lord This, sweet-talking Doctor That, bowling
His wit down levees, bosoms, siller quaichs –
D’ye think he’s ever heard the groans and skraighs
Of city gutters, or marked the shapes that wrap
Fog and smoke about them as if they could hap
Homelessness or keep hunger at bay? What,
Not heard or seen, but has he even thought
How some, and many, and more than many, survive,
Or don’t survive, on factory floors, or thrive
Or fail to thrive by foundry fires, or try
To find the words – sparks scatter and bolts fly –
That’s feeble – to show the new age its dark face?
The Carron Ironworks – how he laughed at the place,
Made a joke of our misery, passed on
To window-scratch his diamond-trivia, and swan
Through country-house and customs-post, servile
To the very gods from which he ought to resile!
“Liberty’s a glorious feast,” you said.
Is that right? Wouldn’t the poor rather have bread?
Burns man, I’m hard on you, I’m sorry for it.
I think such poetry is dangerous, that’s all.
Poetry must pierce the filthy wall
With cries that die on country ways. The glow
Of bonhomie will not let the future grow.

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340d

Teacher, scholar,
he had worked a true task when all alive…

—Iain Crichton Smith, “For Angus MacLeod”
Published in New Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2011)

Today, 5 October, is World Teachers Day. In this poem Iain Crichton Smith, himself a teacher, celebrates the life of a former Headmaster of Oban High School

1/4

https://www.unesco.org/en/days/teachers

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldTeachersDay #teaching #teachers #education #school #schools

Iain Crichton Smith
For Angus MacLeod
Headmaster, and Editor of Gaelic Poems

Today they laid him in the earth’s cold colour,
a man from Lewis with his seventy-five
years struck from his head. Teacher, scholar,
he had worked a true task when all alive,

building a school, elucidating texts.
The Gaelic shone quite clearly in his bones.
A casket filled with ashes had been mixed
with filtered sunlight and the small stones.

A useful life with pupils and with poems:
sufficient honours (his humour asked no more)
he takes his place in many minds and rooms.
Without their knowing it, his patient care

instructs far hands to turn a new lever,
a voice to speak in a mild-mannered tone.
The deeds we do reverberate forever.
Inveterate justice weighs the flesh and bone.

His best editions are some men and women
who scrutinise each action like a word.
The truest work is learning to be human
definitive texts the poorest can afford.

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339d

Love is all you need: Remembering The Kingis Quair

Alan Riach discusses The Kingis Quair – a poem attributed to King James I of Scots (1394–1437), & described by C.S. Lewis as “the first modern book of love”

https://www.thenational.scot/news/17372009.love-is-all-you-need-remembering-the-kings-quair/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #lovepoetry #medieval #Scots #Scotslanguage #15thcentury #Scotstober

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339d

New College Festival of Books & Belief
7–8 November, Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh’s New College Festival of Books & Belief invites speakers & writers from the UK & beyond to explore the relationship between literature & all aspects of belief.

The fifth Festival will be held on 7–8 November 2025 – see link for programme

https://divinity.ed.ac.uk/new-college-festival/programme

#Scottish #literature #belief #religion

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338d

Well Versed Author Event: Imtiaz Dharker
15 Oct, online – free

A poetry reading & audience Q&A with Imtiaz Dharker, part of Open Book’s Well Versed series in partnership with StAnza International Poetry Festival

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/well-versed-author-event-imtiaz-dharker-tickets-1729406705009

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry

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339d

BANNED BOOKS WEEK
5–11 October 2025

Tom Leonard’s 1984 poetry collection INTIMATE VOICES was banned in Scotland’s Central Region school libraries. The Education Committee said

“There are some harmful words in it … Sometimes the naked truth has to be clothed”

But Leonard had anticipated this sort of reaction…

1/3

#Scottish #literature #BannedBooksWeek #censorship #poem #poetry #TomLeonard

A pale green book cover. In the middle is a white rectangle. A large red stamp displays the book title: TOM LEONARD: INTIMATE VOICES: 1965–1983. Above the stamp is a poem, set as if typed on a typewriter:

in the beginning was the word
in thi beginning was thi wurd
in thi beginnin was thi wurd
in thi biginnin was thi wurd
n thi biginnin wuz thi wurd
nthi biginnin wuz thi wurd
nthi biginnin wuzthi wurd
nthibiginnin wuzthiwurd
nthibiginninwuzthiwurd
in the beginning was the sound

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339d

In the latest Scots Whay Hae! podcast, Graeme Macrae Burnet discusses his new novella BENBECULA, the gothic tradition, how historical fiction speaks to the present day, & how BENBECULA links to HIS BLOODY PROJECT, Graeme’s Booker-shortlisted 2016 novel

@bookstodon

https://www.scotswhayhae.com/post/dark-isle-the-scots-whay-hae-podcast-talks-to-graeme-macrae-burnet

#Scottish #literature #gothic #historicalfiction #CrimeFiction

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339d

“Ending badly from the beginning”: facing finitude with Robert Louis Stevenson
8 October, University of Edinburgh & online – free

What does it mean to live – and to write – well, through experiences of illness and in the shadow of death? An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar from Dr Shari Sabeti

@litstudies

https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/event/dr-shari-sabeti-‘ending-badly-beginning’-facing-finitude-robert-louis-stevenson

#Scottish #literature #RobertLouisStevenson #Samoa #illness #culturalstudies #death

Event date: Wednesday 8 October
Time: 13:00-14:00
Location: Seminar room, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW

An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Shari Sabeti (Sabbatical Fellow, 2025)

‘Ending badly from the beginning’: facing finitude with Robert Louis Stevenson.

What does it mean to live - and to write - well, through experiences of illness and in the shadow of death? Is death the end, or the beginning of relationships? This presentation considers these questions through an exploration of the life, work, and legacy of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It focuses on his last years, as both exile and settler colonial, in Sāmoa, a Pacific island he had travelled to in search of health. Drawing on Barthes’ concepts of the punctum and biographeme, as well as writing on illness (Sontag, Frank), the chapter blends ethnographic fieldwork, literary and photographic analysis, elements of biography and personal reflection. It argues that Stevenson’s relationship with Sāmoa and Samoans continues through to the present day in oral histories, school songs, grave-site rituals, and community narratives that position him within specifically Sāmoan frameworks of care, kinship, and place.

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338d

Noo Maunsie’s wis as guid a tongue
As ever psalm o’ Dauvid sung.
It fittit weel a godly mooth,
And said few wirds ’at wirna truth,
An’ never swöre by Guid or Deil
Excep’ whan kyunnens ate his kail…

—from “Auld Maunsie’s Crü” by B.R. Anderson (1861–1888), in Broken Lights: Poems & Reminiscences of the Late Basil Ramsay Anderson (1888) – republished in 2021 by Northus Shetland Classics

https://www.michaelwalmer.com/northus-shetland-classics/p/broken-lights-poems-and-reminiscences-of-basil-ramsay-anderson-introduced-by-robert-alan-jamieson

#Scottish #literature #Scots #Scotslanguage #Shetland #Scotstober #poem #poetry

Noo Maunsie’s wis as guid a tongue
As ever psalm o’ Dauvid sung.
It fittit weel a godly mooth,
And said few wirds ’at wirna truth,
An’ never swöre by Guid or Deil
Excep’ whan kyunnens ate his kail.

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338d

Aifter the boombers cleck
and the sodgers traik thro the skau
there’s an auld air sterts up –
bubblin and greetin.

It’s a ballant mithers sing
on their hunkers i the stour
for a bairn deid.

They ken it by hert.

—Alastair Mackie, “Pietà”
published in The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse, @canongatebooks, 2021

#Scottish #literature #Scots #Scotslanguage #poem #poetry #warpoem #warpoetry

Pietà
Alastair Mackie

Her face was thrawed.
She wisna aa come.

In the trams o her airms
the wummin held oot her first bairn.
It micht hae been a mercat day
and him for sale.
Naebody stoppit tae niffer.

His life bluid cled his breast
wi a new reid semmit.
He’d hippens for deid claes.

Aifter the boombers cleck
and the sodgers traik thro the skau
there’s an auld air sterts up –
bubblin and greetin.

It’s a ballant mithers sing
on their hunkers i the stour
for a bairn deid.

They ken it by hert.

It’s the cauldest grue i the universe
yon skelloch.
It niver waukens the deid.

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338d

The Maud Sulter Annual Lecture
31 October, Glasgow School of Art – free

Pratibha Parmar met Maud Sulter in the mid 1980’s when many outside the mainstream arts establishment were committed to growing a vibrant Black women’s arts movement. Parmar will talk about these foundational moments in dialogue with Sulter’s work & their reverberations today.

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/event/the-maud-sulter-annual-lecture-with-pratibha-palmar/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #photography #film #movingimage #art #MaudSulter #womensart #Blackwomen

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2y

“THE DYNAMITER is a hugely inventive & brilliant book, at once a political thriller, a blackly comic satire, & a female adventure”

Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne married #OTD, 19 May, 1880. In this article, Prof Penny Fielding explores the dangerous #collaboration between RLS & his wife: granting female agency on the page & in life

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #RobertLouisStevenson #WomenWriters #humour

@bookstodon

https://dangerouswomenproject.org/2017/01/06/a-dangerous-collaboration/

Book cover

More New Arabian Nights

THE DYNAMITER

By R. L. & F. Stevenson

London

Longmans Green & Co.

Price One Shilling

Cover illustration shows a man in a Victorian frock coat nervously descending a ladder which is propped up against a tall stone wall. At the top of the wall we can the head and shoulders of a smiling man with side-whiskers and a slouch hat.

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277d

I ask no lovelier thing
Than this December silver:
See how the light flakes off the new-turned plough
Under the slow great swing
Of branches, silver-boled…

—Dorothy Margaret Paulin, “December Day”
published in SCOTTISH RELIGIOUS POETRY (Saint Andrew Press, 2024)

https://standrewpress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781800830479/scottish-religious-poetry

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #December #20thcentury #womenwriters

Dorothy Margaret Paulin
1904–1982

December Day

I ask no lovelier thing
Than this December silver:
See how the light flakes off the new-turned plough
Under the slow great swing
Of branches, silver-boled;
Not all the silken, tender ways of spring
Can over-pass this cold
And windy beauty; see
Where thin-blown ripples spreading
Pattern the water with a mesh of gold.
Not war, nor present misery,
Can rout earth’s ageless peace
Or check the steady rhythm of her soil
To yield and year’s increase.
Yet sun in earth, yet love in man works on,
And shall not cease.

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