Milne’s Bar, 2008

Scanned plastic bought me
another Mackay Brown book
and I brought it into Milne’s Bar
where old-fashioned notes
got me a pint to drink
while I wrote:

words fly out of cell phones
in text-talk abbreviations
as laptops launch emails
among the conversations.

And with the smokers outside
the air is so clear I see anachronisms
in my paper and pen
and bag full of books by men
who sat here twenty years
before I was even born.

Their conversations long gone,
their words still here
in the bag I shoulder,
and carry on.

Note: Milne’s Bar in Edinburgh was a famous haunt of Scottish poets in the fifties and sixties. T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Sean O’Casey were all said to have visited, and W.H. Auden and Stevie Smith were said to have sang together at the bar.

Wee Boys, Big Ideas

We marched across Maryburgh
into Blairadam forest, up
through Adam’s estate, and on
to Dowhill Castle .

Our feet burned, and burns
soothed our soles, drowning
all trace of scent blood hounds
might sniff out.

English shape-shifters appeared
everywhere we went
in brambles, ferns, Sycamore.
Swords slashed, snapped, severed,

and bark split open like skin;
branches broke like limbs.
And docken leaves bandaged
Nettle-stung ankles, torn

barb-tugged socks.
And we marched on,
jumping gates, climbing tree’s,
telling stories:

“Robert the Bruce fixed hooves
oan a horse back tae front
so The English followin uh’m
went the rang wiy!”

Oh, but how
to do so with BMX tires?
On! Through “dead man’s marsh,”
smearing mud camouflage across

cheeks and brows, scooping
mud bombs (squelchy-grenades
that splatter like brains all over
the English!)

And on by the granny-glares of cows
(Buffalo , to be hunted later!)
On, over ploughed fields, bridges,
the ruins of cottages and

on and on and
there, at last, Dowhill!
Much of it hidden by leaves,
like the history of it and

everything else:
partly revealed, partly hidden for
imaginations to uncover,
embellish, or

invent:
“Wallace trapped English there
n burned thum alive!
That’s hoo it’s in ruins!”

Twenty years on I
excavate ruins of my own,
reading how Robert Adam
once stood before Dowhill,

inspired to build new things
two centuries ago.
Two tables away a
thirty-something father enthuses

about his weapons collection
and what his imagination
could do: “if terrorists invaded,
ken?

Cause who knows when
They’ll strike again?
Somedie’s goat tae take
responsibility fir the bairns.”