Eggplant.place

45d

I want answers, but there are only the wild geese
Calling, high in the almost-dark, bearing south,
And me, stopped short, clutching a bag of groceries
On the doorstep of my not-quite home…

—Susan Mansfield, “Bearing South”
from The Rooftop Busker: New Writing Scotland 33 (ASL, 2015)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #autumn

Susan Mansfield
BEARING SOUTH

I want answers, but there are only the wild geese
Calling, high in the almost-dark, bearing south,
And me, stopped short, clutching a bag of groceries
On the doorstep of my not-quite home.
I feel the calm of their inner compass
And wonder if this is what we mean by certainty,
A deft arrowhead of wingbeats
In tune with the turning wind, the changing light,
A geography in their feathery breasts
Older than the names of continents.
A journey without thought of parting or arrival,
Only the press of forward motion,
The urgency and risk of it all,
A brief touch-down in stubble fields, then on,
The pulse of fellow flyers in the slipstream
And the clear voices calling in the dark:
I am here, I am alive,
I am here, I am alive.

ALT

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44d

Faar’s Baabie Jeanie’s loon? The aal wife hersel
Stans treeshin hame the milkers at the ley park yett…

—“War: 1939–1945”, by Flora Garry (1900–2000) – born #OTD, 30 September
Published in FROM THE LINE: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945

1/2

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

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #poem #poetry #Scots #Scotslanguage #warpoetry #WW2

Flora Garry
War: 1939–1945

‘Faar’s Baabie Jeanie’s loon? The aal wife hersel
Stans treeshin hame the milkers at the ley park yett.
Faa caas the mornin cairt an fordals neeps an strae,
Wi waages up an risin an fee’d folk sae ull to get?
Baabie Jeanie’s Jockie, faar’s he?

An yon swack hashin chiel in Willum Sinclair’s shop?
He heeld ye oot o langour, sae joco an kin’ly wi’t.
‘Noo, lassie’ to the grunnies: ‘Weel, dearie’ to the quines,
He’s a want ahin the coonter, Willum’s sic a strunge breet.
I miss a news wi yon lad. Faar’s he?

An Droggie’s clivver dother? She could mak her fadder’s peels.
Nae hoven wyme or clocher, nae beelin, hack or strain
Bit she could ease; an fin royt nackets tummelt greetin at their play
She’d rowe up their bleedit sair bits, sen them duncin furth again.
The bairns likit Chrissie. Faar’s she?

An Cyaarnadellie’s foreman? I’ the clear Spring nichts
He trystit wi the banker’s deemie up at the market place.
Noo, she’s skycin roun the gable-eyn, her leen, i the early gloam,
Wi a muckle cwyte aboot her an a graavit ower her face.
Cyaarnadellie’s foreman, faar’s he?’

‘Speir at the waarslin tides, the desert saans, the caal starlicht.
They ken far.’

ALT

treeshin: calling; enticing
yett: gate
fordals: stores
swack: agile
hashin: hustling
heeld ye: held you
languor: boredom
joco: jovial
quines: young girls
strunge breet: surly chap
droggie: the chemist
peels: pills
hoven wyme: swollen stomach
clocher: cough
beelin: festering sore
royt nackets: boisterous children
trystit: met regularly, 'dated'
deemie: maid, general servant
skycin: scurrying
her leen: alone
cwyte: coat
graavit: scarf
speir: enquire

ALT

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44d

Today, 30 September, is International Translation Day – read THE BOTTLE IMP: Scottish literature & translation issue free online:

🇩🇪 SUNSET SONG in the GDR
🇮🇹 THE BLACK ARROW on Italian TV
🏆 Scotland’s Nobel-nominated Esperanto poet
🇫🇷 Franco-Scots poetry & postcolonialism
🏗️ Transcreating concrete poetry

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2019/12/bad-harsk-speech-and-lewit-barbar-tung/

#Scottish #literature #InternationalTranslationDay #translation #SunsetSong #GDR #Italian #Esperanto #French #postcolonial #poetry #concretepoetry

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44d

“The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator”

—Edwin Morgan on translating Mayakovsky into Scots

1/3

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/edwin-morgan-in-touch-with-language/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #translation #InternationalTranslationDay #Scots #Scotslanguage #Russian #EdwinMorgan #Mayakovsky

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44d

Professor John Corbett discusses Edwin Morgan’s translation of Rostand’s CYRANO DE BERGERAC – from our 2021 Schools Conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0lp5t85x2g

#Scottish #literature #theatre #drama #translation #InternationalTranslationDay #Cyrano

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44d

“Somehow hearing the play in Scots gave Anglophone audiences an insight into Tremblay that had hitherto eluded them”

—Mark Fisher on MICHEL TREMBLAY: PLAYS IN SCOTS – Scots translations of 8 plays by the Quebecois playwright

1/4

https://www.critical-stages.org/29/michel-tremblay-plays-in-scots-two-vols/

#Scottish #literature #Scots #Scotslanguage #drama #theatre #Quebec #Tremblay #translation #InternationalTranslationDay

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27d

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe’s morning broke…

—“Hamnavoe”, by George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) – born #OTD, 17 Oct

“I have never seen his poetry sufficiently praised.”
—Seamus Heaney

A 🎂 🧵

You can listen to George Mackay Brown read his poem “Hamnavoe” online via the Poetry Archive

1/7

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/hamnavoe/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Orkney #20thcentury

Hamnavoe
George Mackay Brown

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke

On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.

Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of corn-stalks and milk.

In the Arctic Whaler three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.

ALT

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven.
And lovers Unblessed by steeples lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.

He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
My seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;

And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

ALT

Edited 27d ago

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40d

From Canonmills To Coral Islands
10 Nov, Edinburgh – free

From his first day at school in Canonmills to his last day as a world-famous author on the Pacific island of Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) led a remarkable life.

Join folk singer & RLS biographer Jeremy Hodges for a musical journey through that lifelong adventure, featuring Stevenson’s own poetry.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-canonmills-to-coral-islands-tickets-1757066466099

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #RobertLouisStevenson #Edinburgh #Samoa

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27d

“I remember being excited by its ingenious allegory, allusions to nuclear holocaust behind something timeless, almost heraldic. I was drawn, surely, to the unusual combination of spiritual reach and humour, as well as recognising the poet’s extraordinary gift for characterisation in miniature.”

—John Greening on discovering George Mackay Brown

https://wildcourt.co.uk/discovering-george-mackay-brown/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Orkney

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43d

John Buchan: A Man For Our Time?

Prof Murray Pittock discusses John Buchan – a literary legend & a man ahead of his time on issues from Scottish nationalism to the rights of indigenous peoples. Recorded at the 2025 Beyond Borders International Festival.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5zPRJt1Hdg

#Scottish #literature #Buchan #JohnBuchan

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43d

For want o luve we live on hate,
For want o Heven praise the State,
For want o richts we worship rules,
For want o gods the glibbest fules…

—Sydney Goodsir Smith, “Prolegomenon: The Deevil’s Waltz”
published in A KIST O SKINKLAN THINGS: an anthology of Scots poetry
from the first & second waves
of the Scottish Renaissance (ASL, 2017)

Happy #Scotstober!

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/a-kist-o-skinlan-things/

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #Scots #Scotslanguage #poem #poetry #Scotstober #richts

Sydney Goodsir Smith
Prolegomenon
The Deevil’s Waltz

Rin an rout, rin an rout,
Mahoun gars us birl about,
He skirls his pipes, he stamps his heel
The globe’s gane gyte in a haliket reel.

There, the statesman’s silken cheats,
Here, the bairnless mither greits,
There, a tyrant turns the screw,
Here, twa luvers’ broken vows.

Enemies out, enemies in,
Truth a hure wi the pox gane blinn,
Nou luvers’ lips deny luve’s name
An get for breid a chuckie-stane,

We kenna hert, we kenna heid,
The deevil’s thirled baith quick an deid,
Jehovah snores, and Christ himsel
Lowps in the airms o Jezebel.

ALT

The sweit that rins frae his thorned brou
Is black as the staunan teats o his cou
In the waltz o tears, an daith, an lies,
Juliet’s fyled wi harlotries.

O luve itsel at Hornie’s lauch
Skeers lik a caunel i the draucht,
The dance is on, the waltz o hell,
The wund frae its fleean skirts is snell.

It whups black storm frae lochan’s calm,
Sets banshees in the house o dwaum,
Gars black bluid spate the hert o me
—An watters guid-sirs’ barley bree!

A few damned feckless fanatics
Wad halt the borneheid dance o Styx,
Their cry o truth the whirlwind reaps,
For pity’s deid, and mercy sleeps.

Orpheus alane dow sauve frae deid
His ravished Bride gin but she’d heed—
Ay, truth an luve like Albyn’s life
Hing wi a threid, kissed be a knife.

Ilk derkenin owre some huddered toun
The pipes an fiddles screich an boom,
The cauldron’s steered by Maestro Nick
Wi a sanct’s shin-bane for parritch-stick.

He lauchs his lauch, the angels greit
Wi joy as they dine on carrion meat;
Ablow, bumbazed, dumfounered cods,
We seek the starns in dubs an bogs.

Oor ingyne’s deaved, oor mous are shut,
Oor saul contract like a runkled nut,
Een cannae see the trees for the wuid
An hert is cauld for want o bluid.

ALT

For want o luve we live on hate,
For want o Heven praise the State,
For want o richts we worship rules,
For want o gods the glibbest fules.

Obey, Obey; ye maunna spier!
(Libertie’s disjaskit lear!)
While Cloutie pipes it’s crime tae think,
—It’s taxed e’en higher nor the drink!

O, rin an rout, we birl about,
Tae the rhythm o the Deil’s jack-boot,
Black as auld widdie-fruit, Mahoun
Bestrides a kenless mappamound.

ALT

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41d

Concrete Scottish Connections: Finlay, Jandl, Gomringer, & Satie
22 Oct, Edinburgh – free

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ernst Jandl, & Eugen Gomringer – all born in 1925 – helped shape concrete poetry, breaking linguistic barriers & reimagining the power of words

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/concrete-scottish-connections-finlay-jandl-gomringer-and-satie-tickets-1743611311369

#Scottish #literature #German #poetry #concretepoetry

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41d

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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43d

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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27d

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.

ALT

Edited 27d ago

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42d

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.

ALT

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

ALT

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.

ALT

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42d

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.

ALT

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.

ALT

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42d

“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!

ALT

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42d

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.

ALT

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.

ALT

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42d

“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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26d

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.

ALT

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26d

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.

ALT

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26d

“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.

ALT

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39d

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.

ALT

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38d

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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