Fegs, Rab, fa’s thon gowk stravaigin truly / who’s / fool / wandering
doon the road, clarty locks shakin dirty
and wheemerin o’ his spaul-banes achin? complaining / back-bones
Puir bummer, singer
dreein a darg o’ tattie-howkin bearing / job of work / potato-picking
aa bluidy summer.
Keekin oot frae Auld Meldrum looking
ye maun hae seen Bennachie’s lum must / chimney
faur a haill clamjamfrie cam where / whole / crowd
fer a stramash fight
in Roman times, lea’in sum
puir fowk gey hasht. badly injured
But fit’s that noo stramash I’m hearin’? what’s / argument
Jouk in here, or we’re forfaren! duck / done-for
Some het aquavit’ll wet yer thrapple, hot / windpipe
I dare say. The weither’s aafa dreich: quite dreary
it’s chuckin – dingin it doon. My Doric raining hard
comes and goes: I’m also nae sae supple
wi’ the habbie, Rab; hence these sonnets. Habbie stanza
Bank that fire up. Pass me a Sunday Post
(‘Vote No to Save the Union’): let it toast,
its hopes sent up in flames, just like the Nats’.
But what is our nation? well you might ask now
’14’s been added to the bingo card
of Scotland’s jackpot years the wrong side claimed,
and Bingo caller Cameron tells us how
the loser gets one Devo Max and, coward
Purple and yellow polka-dot town houses
hewn from every kind of rock do not
this city make, that takes its granite neat
and cuts dead all your garish non-grey choices.
That flash of red’s a trawler from Stavanger,
or is it a Tennents T glimpsed through the haar? sea mist
There’s nary a lantern I’ll not follow here,
shipmate, if it means us dropping anchor.
Ah Scotland, deck for the bard fit music hall,
ringing with Burns’s lays or pibroch’s skreed; bagpipe music
but you’ve not heard of Burns (though he loved you),
the sailors pile into a strip bar while –
remembering your line that ‘music’s dead’ –
a busking piper hangs his head, soaked through.
Burns, Rab Burns, makar o’ ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ – poet
thon carle whase statue stands aff Union Street fellow // disgusted
and whase scunnert, bronze een weel micht greet eyes well might weep
like oors for Scotland and the spell she’s under. ours
Westminster warlocks gatherin i’ the mirk dark
gae primpit like the beldams frae Macbeth bedecked / witches
and, ech, bite haurd for auld wives wantin teeth –
each uggsome form thrawin off its cutty sark. ugly / short skirt
The dowie ghaists reek worse than alley cat-spray: dismal
Gordon Broon spoons up his Tory porridge,
Jim Murphy does a turn as Harry Lauder,
Alistair Darling’s eyebrows dance the strathspey,
and, what’s this, Tony Blair, Bob Geldof, George
But aa Scots sloch aits, scrieved Samy Johnson. eat oats / wrote
He’ll be a lang time ficklin o’er his brose puzzling / porridge
afore yer haemil leid stairts mouin prose homely tongue / mouthing
the like o’ whilk the doctor hings his rants on. which / hangs
Grub Street’s ‘lexipharian’ non-pareil!
Ye didna wiss the Doc tae lear the Scots need / teach
mair fantoush, gawsy weys tae dink their thochts, pretentious / showy
wi’ aye sae mony gleg tongues on the payroll. smart
There’s bings o’ Pictish stanes in Auld Brythonic heaps
and Arthur Johnston’s Inverurie Latin;
MacDiarmid made his Shetland stanes speak Norn
and Gaelic corrieneuchs are aye a tonic. conversations
But queen o’ aa’s a tongue mair aften shat on:
this throughother speech, this Scots, in which we’re twan. twinned
Gies your gab, I might say, though another talk to me
Robert (Garioch) pulled this trick first, years back.
I bounce my voice off his and get yours back
as well: the banter of aa loons thegither. all boys together
I’ve couthied up across the decades aince cosied / once
before, Rab, to a countryman of mine,
James Clarence Mangan – have you met? You maun should
exchange verse letters or a sonnet sequence.
But ay loons, loons! The only quine you’ll find always / girl
in Mangan’s Róisín Dubh, and Aberdeen’s
a statue park for chain-mailed beardy blokes.
Where’s Mother Scotia, ‘that beauty lang had kend’? known
Sharp on the breeze, a rowst of high-pitched quines rowdiness
Ane place ye’ll hear a lassie’s voice is sangschaws one / song shows
doon The Blue Lamp: ‘There lived twa sisters
in ane bower…’ Songs whaur hairt-wae festers heartbreak
wi’ unfinished business, sair and anxious. sore
And someone’s for the chop: ‘He’s coorted the eldest
wi’ his penknife…’ But then she kills the younger
quine for spite, wha’d ne’er done ocht tae wrong her.
Songs that chowk the dulie lungs like coal-dust. sad
You’d a braw voice for your ‘Lassie My Dearie’, fine
but a maiden in song is soon unmade:
the hairt’s mair slauchterhoose than nunnery. heart
Strike up while you can wi’ ‘Lassie Lie Near Me’,
but ballads want blood: ‘There’s either a maid
or a milk-white swan drooned in the dams of Minorie.’
Tumblin doon the howff stairs wi’ a curt aith inn / oath
while airtin for the gents’, ye end up arselins making for / on your backside
i’ the strone and gleeked by some coarse loons. gutter / mocked
Auld breeks, auld freend throu daftest days o’ poortith, maddest / poverty
and duddy trooser-seat: fit times ye hae ragged
brookin yer puir embarras de richesse enjoying / poor
o’ aa the jyle cells, bar stuils, braes an ditches
ye’ve made yer awn through years o’ sons and wae. own / plenty / woe
Yet part we maun, ye tell yer breeks, then lab must / throw
them oot the winda on some hoosemaid’s heid.
Who wears the troosers noo? On my heid too,
amang Edina’s roses, yer breeks drop, full chamberpots
and braithing deep the fairty guff ye dreed smell / endured
Your words to me are ‘Caller Water’, a fons fresh
Bandusiae whose living streams I sup.
Scotland is Greece and Rome: I lap it up,
and dream of lochans thronged with nymphs and fauns.
But these days ‘Caller Water’ comes in bottles
with Alka Seltzer bubbles for effect,
and nature privatised is nature fucked –
a dying grouse some bastard gillie throttles.
Where wee whaups picked their way on sandy feet curlews
Donald Trump lines up a hole-in-one
and buzzing choppers fill the air, not lav’rocks. larks
Lose ‘Caller Water’, choose black gold: reboot
as Scotland’s corporate Anacreon,
laureate of share quotes, Mercs and oil rigs.
This traipsin’s takin affa lang to get
you saufly hame frae Aberdeen to Embra. safely home
Becalmed in this vagabond penumbra
in your brouky claes and buits ye tug at – dirty clothes / boots
a Donside Rimbaud – fit ye need’s a hobby. what
Have you tried creative writing? ‘Unlock
Your Inner Poet’, ‘Self-Publish Your First Book’ –
ye ken the drill – ‘Connecting With the Habbie.’
I’d sign you up, but some young poet you are:
nae website, nae on twitter, New Gen reject –
ye’re gangin naewey fest. It matters, son; going nowhere
your retro maudit act’s fair fooshtit-dour. quite stale
I’ll do PR, you get your poems rejigged.
Fornenst Dunnottar Castle, history’s alongside
a teemit skull, spugs an foumaws threidin empty / sparrows / fulmars
its een like weyrs to stap the sicht they’re dreidin needles
o’ yet mair Covenanters, Whigs and Tories.
Lang syne, here sic an sic dang sae an sae: such & such / smote / so & so
here hunders birned and stairved and drouned in keech shit
as God ordained and ministers would preach;
nou as then the ootleuk’s gey wanchancy. outlook / very ill-omened
Gin the stanes could speak they’d airt yer glower If / direct your gaze
to whaur Bill Wallace stuid and bid ye ken
the foumaw’s nest they mynd aince on thon swaird, remember / once / sward
fer history’s the glamour and the glaur enchantment / dirt
o’ ages caldrife tae the works o’ men – indifferent
a butterfly perked on the Bruce’s swuird. perched / sword
A butterfly flees aboon Union Street, flies above
where wage slaves, in your day gart tae scriven, made
dunt at keyboards, data-input-driven. strike
I follow your words, but all I do’s repeat,
repeat, repeat, just like your scratchy quill.
Deposition, divorce and testament –
like art without the rhyme-words at the end –
pile up, words no one reads and no one will.
You write your testament and date it blank.
It’s only a convention, after all,
a canty farewell practised like a lesson. playful
Death, like scrivening, comes down to ink:
a paper signed, you handing me your will
‘In the cells’: your final tumble ends
not on a stairwell but a Bedlam ward,
whaur manin bare-scud doiterels gae afeart moaning naked insane / afraid
o’ rattons like a plague their last duim sends. rats / doom
Ane puir quaichin bedlar’s Jesus Christ, screaming inmate
anither’s Charlie Stewart hissel retoured: Bonnie Prince Charlie himself returned
twa keengs o’ keengs doverin i’ the clart kings / dozing / dirt
an keepin up their dirdum till aa’s wheesht. racket / silent
Throu yer snell deid-thraw and fit comes efter harsh death-rattle
I hear nae cruinin frae the ghaistly choir, mourning
but aye the river o’ Scots song flowen away
and spierin doucely as it gaes if there asking softly
isna time fer – gie it laldy – ane mair perform with brio
chorus o’ ‘The Birks of Invermay’.
Yet part we maun, wi’ teemit wame, empty belly
nae gweed braid claith tae aither’s name good broad cloth / either’s
an nae mair crack as ye tramp hame, dialogue
forwandert chiel lost child
wi’ naewey ’neath the mune’s bricht leam nowhere / glow
tae gie ye biel. shelter
Ettlin tae souch fareweel I’m drooned trying to sigh
oot by the traffeck soothwart-boond, south-bound
an Aberdein is dreich, dreich grund
fer a gaun-aboot wanderer
fa tholes tho he can scantlins staund endures / hardly stand
ilk bygaein plowt, each passing shower
an hailsed by nae lumb’s cadgy reek welcomed / chimney’s friendly smoke
alane throu wund and mirk maun treik. alone / wind and dark / tramp