To find the backdrop to each poem, please click on the image below that poem.
The Story Garden
Spring to winter,
coloured chalks travel with me.
Last spring, on Phoenix Road,
chalks of every colour invited us
into ‘The Story Garden’.
A re-born triangle of green
wedged between two railway lines,
where metallic hums give way
to bird song
and every spring is an arrival.
Frequent Flyer Tour
Adventures do not need flight
Not at least in the physical sense.
Adventures happen close to home!
Rachel’s flit fae ‘the Ferry’ –
Flat for sale in a Tollcross tenement
in un-lit, back stairwell,
where [somehow] an old Fringe Festival Poster had found home.
The FREQUENT FLYING TOUR,
still SHOUTING in it’s other world
of letters and time.
We can learn by living
and we can learn by another way
– let us call it for what it is –
the CREATIVE!
STAIRWAY [Courtauld]
Royal Academy ‘Summer Series’
Angels, Dancers and Gossipers
inviting us to climb a marble circular stairway.
Each step towards that ‘Great Room’
where, on the very top floor
the future would be daylight.
It was the Academy porter, John Withers
– silent as light
who checked our tickets.
At the top of the stairway to impressionism.
Words are not wasted
A century aifter your death
the Servitor of the building
that had once been your school
identified your initials
carved in stone.
Walter, you were a rebel screiver,
an auld reekie Montaigne!
Not as brave as you,
I lightly chalked on stone –
‘This should be a music school’
[‘sed semel ansanivimus’, page 109, The Antiquary]
Beckett’s Last Tapes
Cut-out schoolboy
the further he goes
the more good he does.
[It is the adventurous who are shy]
Little girl from the Big house
Blow, Bugle, Blow!
Little girl from the Big House
Blow, Bugle, Blow!
Shatter that Carrara marble angel
Little girl from the Big House.
Blow, Bugle, Blow!
Sing to us as we sit on your bench by the pond.
Little girl from the Big House.
STONOR
Her studio filled with
light.
Her ‘Beaux Art’ eyes
emerald green.
Her Flaxman art
inside, outside,
fluid without margins.
In the grammar of dance
the punctuation is freer
The first line: Alexander McCall Smith. The second line: Ian McEwan
Narrator is a paperboy
Hiding behind closed doorways,
he could see
what most adults cannot –
colours in shadow.
Mrs BLUNT
The ninth child of
‘Star Spangled Banner’
with a voice that was
‘singularly musical’
of which,
the faintest whisper
could be heard.
That night, in Edinburgh,
you read for the
last time.
EVER SINCE SPACE ODDITY
Black Star you gave birth to a
New Sound.
Black Star that wee space, in the
whole of Time.
Black star, you did not
die.
Mr BENN
1967 issue, you brought
TECHNICOLOUR to me.
In your magical shop,
brimming with colour
you transformed
from a shadow
into somebody else.
On our shared adventures,
never once, did you need
technicolur
to reveal your kindness.
Leave your mark
Colours are for warmth,
colours are for drama!
Leave your mark
in coloured chalks!
There’s an old story
There’s an old story about
an artist called Giotto.
Giotto used blue to
turn the world into stories.
There’s no blue
like Giotto blue!
Make your world
Make your world of coloured chalks!
Let the colours live
with secrets behind!
And remember –
you can always add a late footnote
in colour!
There’s still a little bit left
Silver-foiled, crumpled, sweetie wrappers,
children chalking games –
BROTHER + SISTER noughts and crosses
on Townhead’s tenement walls.
Just look back and listen!
Goodsir-Smith, in ‘Portrait of an Artist’
did he see or hear this:
‘Eardley just paints’, he said.
Whilst painting, Eardley talked of children
‘they let out their life and energy’.
This was1951 at the beginning of which
The Calton Picture House was projecting
a new film in colour
‘Edge of the World’.
This was 1951 in the spring of which
children [in black and white] danced the ‘Singing Street’
‘We just want to be part of history’
‘to be looked back on and seen as an achievement’.
This was 1951 in the autumn of which,
Eardley was still painting children in her
Townhead studio
‘The community feeling is rapidly disappearing . . .
but there’s still a little bit left’.
BROADWAY ANGEL
[This poem is for Grace Lindsay Webster who died in Aberdeen, December 1923]
‘For all your Projection Needs’
King’s Cinema, George Street, Aberdeen
Closed in 1940.
Transformed in war time to become
Maximes Ball Room,
where tea and cakes were served on the balcony.
Before being closed and demolished,
to ‘clear space’ for a car park.
Grace, the King’s was your husband’s
‘Granite City’ paradiso
In the King’s your daughter played the piano
[movies then being silent].
Late winter 1923 , without warning, Grace, you dropped dead
[you will not recall this]
Your family, still young, raised an
Angel statue of you.
She is extraordinarily beautiful.
1960s,
And the world had turned and turned,
your Angel statue
featured in a ‘televisual poem’,
titled ‘Heart of Stone’.
Your name and story forgotten
Grace, you project beauty.
“There’s a lovely walk through the cemetery. Lots of Angels. Beautiful” Muriel Spark
“They knock down the walls, and all the films stand up out of their dead selves” Ali Smith
Blossom of all kinds
Where is ‘Friendly Park’?
I am told that it is home to blossom of all kinds!
Where is ‘Friendly Park’?
Here, nature herself is said to unfold and emerge.
Where is ‘Friendly Park’?
That place where distance becomes nearness.
Where is ‘Friendly Park’?
I cannot say.
I once found a
rain-faded note pinned upon a gate.
National Playing Fields Association
FOR SALE – Pram, latest model, splendid condition
[12 Lorne Street, Leith]
Big sister, I can see you looking out of the corner
of your Lorne Street home.
Below you children were playing with abandon.
Was that pram your wee brother’s?
Limbus infantum.
Like you, I can see him playing in the
playing fields,
Where he is happy and free.
Faintly heard
Rarely has an image moved me more.
a childhood face, posture
in a dark back stairwell
of Dickson’s Close,
that is no longer there.
You were on your own again,
and in your expressive silence
there is light itself.
Televisual Poems
A televisual wonderland
where even iambs are trochees!
Just look at the colours –
the narrative, the playfulness!
Let your sensitivity be colour,
see the colour in shadows.
In this way
expand your vocabulary!
CITIZENS
There must be few citizens
Alive today
who recall the lavatory on the
Cross.
Just a paper-roll away
The CITIZENS Theatre –
that Doric columned temple of the
Muses.
The roof-top statues, carving out
their own skyline.
mid-sentence,
went silent.
That old black and white photograph
‘ALL SEATS 50p!’
Today,
Phoenix-like, you are back!
In a new-guise of old.
CITIZENS
we feel the world as much as we see it!
TRINITY [Rose Park]
So forlorn in that very last
photograph.
It was Washday,
your undergarments hanging to dry
in one of the front rooms.
Rose-Park, life-long home
of Alice and Louise,
two sisters
who had grown old together.
That very last photograph
by a Scotsman photographer –
‘Old Georgian house to be demolished’
‘A way to ease the shortage of building land’
Rose Park, where before your sisterhood
Professor Dunbar was celebrated
for his garden of exotics.
Alice and Louise
Rose Park, that far-sighted home
of your family
Then you grow old. You died.
Two sisters and a house.
Your story unwritten.
‘Retirement flats’ built in your place.
Award winning flats by ‘HERITAGE HOUSING’.
[WASHDAY, Chpt 1 ‘The Blue Flower’ Penelope Fizgerald: ‘Anyway you are a thousand times welcome, at all times’]
To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom
Art is an act of daring –
a beautiful impossible adventure,
Tolstoyan in sweep
revealing Nabokovian delight.
But stop. I am again speaking in fragments,
‘borrowing’ words.
More than a little bit mad.
Still time
to focus on infinity again!
To read what has never been written
Is the world made up only of
letters and numbers?
Surely, there is another way of
Telling! Where ways of seeing
are greater than any alphabet!
So, write, be open
and let everything in!
[This poem is for John Berger: HERE is WHERE we MEET]
The Lost Weekend
You searched for a meaningful life,
in the urges and hopes
of adolescent love.
a ‘Lost Weekend’
That ‘siren’
of ‘sophisticated attractiveness’
Your poetry hurts.
Melts iron bars.
Your voice forever more than
That weekend.
[A poem is for Cesare Pavese: That Beautiful Summer]
HERE COME THE BEATLES!
The Gaiety, demolished to make way for the M8
‘Improvement work’ necessary
cutting Glasgow in two.
The Gaiety –
perhaps only the record-player
has long-play recall?
I mean in the feel
