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Scotland the Brave!

This Christmas-tide
between sleet and surfeit
I lay my cheek against a stone’s harsh side.
This petrified mother does not speak.
Mythic sisters sit still and dumb.
Grandmothers, your bequeathing is most bleak.
Motionless maidens, to you no lovers come.

When children hunger, no table here is spread.

This ring dance yields frigid bread

From No Elegy

This rear of hills and the encircling sky,
Scotland…

Home of the seagull, home of the oil,
heartland of lost causes, heart’s dream of the exile,
hoast of fawn-faced bronchitics, doomed on the dole,
dun hold of millions in an industrial sprawl,
home of the failed which bred the word ‘leal’.
High priced resort of the tourist, last lap of the Gael…

published in Jenny Robertson, Beyond the Border, Chapman 1989)

Scotland the Brave!

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