Beat the drum, Fly the night, Catch a star
Frost hit Tillybin and froze the night.
Bitingly cold and startlingly clear.
A night that stirred the soul
A night of Spectacle Sight.
Midnight came rhythmically
Andrew beating his drum:
Sian said ‘time to go!’
The windscreen iced over in anticipant celebration
hands that felt no cold rubbed hurriedly
a telescope to the soul.
The car coughed to life
The farm track bumped and hurdled
– as if urging.
Count the gaps: count the rhythm –
Faster: No time to waste!
Fly the pot-holes
Peer the telescope!
Gosh – what’s that? A jewel. A wonder. A spectacle sight.
Hale-bopp: such Brightness.
SUCH BRIGHTNESS.
Beat the drum, fly the night, catch a star
4.04
and Hale-Bopp reigns its brightest!
SUCH BRIGHTNESS.
Peter and Sian
Now ‘mum & dad’
Fingers that could not dial
Lips that could not speak
‘we have a boy… a lovely boy’
Beat the drum, Fly the night, Catch a star!
“I’d Buy you that!”
Too many days have past,
from the days of
the burningly bright eyes of our
innocent and wondrous boy.
As simple as the loss of money!
Not the important stuff:
Andrew, if it were so simple!
I’d buy you no money.
at any price.
Melt the Bear.
Castellated gallery of white
iron-cast pavilions – one atop another,
shine bright on a Scottish spring afternoon.
Clocks, rockets, asteroids, mummies and totem poles;
fish circle the children, pennies circle the pool.
Whale bones suspended disbelieving
– no dinosaur stolen here!
Buttons to press; costumes to dress;
the Antonine Guard recruits a boy!
Peter could peer all from his board
secret in the attic of Chamber Street.
The polar Bear silent and sad. So sad.
he had saved the girl – us all.
Alive only in the mind.
Ode to Narrative.
Born backwards;
could sleep standing-up,
lived in a world upside-down.
silent as light.
grafted like a Scott;
found and loved Cimbrone.
Stars that shine now.
The doctor (under)standing on his head.
Finding Cimbrone
Junior doctors in love –
Peter smitten by eyes deep.
A faltering heart surged as you passed
in white-coat, green mini-skirt and in your pocket
the love-note secretly placed by Peter the night before.
A spoonful of sugar and
the Medicine was in Aberdeen.
Seaton Park gently traversed in a restful peace
– flowering the past, present and future.
Here Peter had his first magical kiss.
Striding on towards the dungeon. The Marischal.
Awaiting Dr Skene – bearded and sinister
punching one-fingered results with palpable sneer!
Indeed this was not yesterday, as Rachel would come to remind us:
Rosemount with cats and fur balls: curtains and croissants.
And ink scribed carefree the Jellicoe way
metamorphosing the romantic in Shute.
And the Autumn brought to us in rich arboreal watercolour:
Getting back to nature: ‘like the primitive man’.
Now is the time of the flowers:
Sentinels of Cimbrone stand tall
graceful in poise, reaching out:
touching the sky.
as newly weds.
And somehow carried back in the scent
through Drumdruills gate and its clipped box path:
leading to the sweetest of peas.
We found Cimbrone in each other.
At Inverewe the Rhoddies were rampant in care-free abandon
And Sissinghurst so alight in Euphorbic lime, but
not (for us) undone by the brilliance of the dazzling White Garden.
Back home, and northern-skied days:
buzzards danced overhead
and we trekked across the fields of Tillybin
down the oak-lined dyke, wandering with the snow-drops and aconites.
And later in the year
towards the castle –
where the philadelphus left us heady and the castle no more than body!
Tae Humbie we went:
Peter’s creative core had tugged.
and marvellously you held on.
Wedding bells would chime and gold rings instantly lost
foretold that we would be together whatever.
love is far more than any symbol or precious gold
The Great Conker Hunt!
Another year! Another year!
Excitement rises for those
inside-shiny-pumpkins.
The giant’s gentle green fingers clasp.
for Kinfaun’s spectacular
rival tae Walnut’s grove.
Boxes laden. Hands held,
feet skip,
purposefully collecting
for some mental feat or other.
Shiny inside pumpkins!
This is not yesterday
Indeed young Rachel, ‘this is not yesterday.’
And oh yes, and for that matter ‘It’s not the meantime now!’
For this is our moment.
Hale Bopp had brought the brightest gift to Aberdeen.
Two comets had blazed in-between
and then faded in the night sky,
but held still,
in our wonderful moment.
It was Aberdeen’s reevin win that brought us our millennium marvel.
Dark eyes brightening the nineteenth.
Hearts bursting with joy beneath.
Tears cradling a wonderful moment.
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month
“over the stair she went, she went….
Heavily down the stairs
Binglety, banglety, bumplety
Down with apple & pears…”
That was how our dear soldier fell.
Stookied in sympathy with thoughts cast
always to dwell in the moment.
Yes, our dear soldier reached out to the lost
and brought them together again
in her kaleidoscope of showering comets
and one last glittering moment.
Moments together in time
Each and every drop, has dropped differently into the moment.
A moment cannot simply belong to a drop.
In this our wonderful, yet falling togetherness
our love is only equal to the moment
in the feeling and the fall.
The bed we made
We are neighbours and friends across a generation, and a fence.
Our houses, laid-out in a mirror opaquely stane:
The 1870’s fancy of Mr Cousin that infinitesimal builder,
built himself so fiery red.
It is long since our lost Cousin made his Victorian bed.
Seven years ago this summer, our neighbour’s wife died.
That spring, I recall seeing Elma at the door of her house
in the mirror of a doctor’s eye:
she could not walk.
Crawford, her husband, dear neighbour, had to support her.
My mirror was useless.
Elma had not broken her leg,
no longer proud of diagnosing little Ali’s break,
a tear – no more than manganese and gravity- fell
as neighbour told that his wife had cancer;
that she was hobbling to her Strathcarron bed.
That summer, Crawford arose every morning and dug,
a beautiful circular bed.
For Elma he filled it with roses.
For several years they were colourful and beautiful;
but the roses, in the shadow of Mossgrove life,
faded.
Not quite Ten Summers have since passed,
and ‘That Summer’ is still as real to me as the bed Crawford made.
So I raised my own summer bed, to Elma and life.
Yesterday, from the mirror, I spotted Crawford digging – early yet again:
digging out the scraggy roses from Elma’s bed.
Today Crawford is sowing grass,
and now both our beds are made.
Potty
Granny is gone.
Her potty rusts and now leaks
The beech tree is ancient, but not near death.
The iron potty was once her doll’s.
Peter is here.
He is potty
and in his leaking, he reveals much iron mongered:
or is that ‘irony mongered’?
Candia’s father rearranged such.
Len you died ‘that summer’:
1940 so somersaultingly real to me.
Natural sciences still cannot hang upon such invisible
at least not revealingly.
The disappearance of appearance.
Glenbardy.
Known to none but Peter.
Nestles in a hill that carries a name that we forget why it was so called.
Our WORLD is here!
Natural sciences are backwards free
yet what is humanity
if not understood in its journey?
Poems need to offer space
I am no more
SERIES II, than you were
SERIES I.
Much space of time has passed between us:
grandson and grandfather.
Each year, new gardeners will sow
sweet peas
and bairns will still run towards them
as I once did when arriving at Drumdruils:
the scent and colour of you.
‘I like it when you call me Mr Scott’
Let us not calculate light
Sian saw a glimmer in me. I was dazzled by Sian
Glimmer or dazzle, dazzle or glimmer:
let us not calculate light!
Together, and only together,
Peter and Sian have wavelength
Sian
Agapanthus: natural, beautiful, reaching
sharing light, colour and presence.
A globe, a world, projecting tall into the clearest of skies.
Without Agapanthus I have no sky.
Anemones
under our hedge:
a blue that
opens up to the world:
I know where love might be found.
Meet you at the statue in an hour
Thank you:
For meeting me (we are part of serendipity)
‘at the statue in an hour’
(more than serendipity)
Thank you:
For marrying me (we are part of serendipity)
We are arresting in our togetherness
(more than serendipity)
Thank you:
For being there for a temperamental artist
We are all scientists!
(more than serendipity)
Thank you:
For your beauty (beauty beyond serendipity)
I have no sky without Cimbrone
Thank you:
4.04
6.26
Our world together.
FOUNTAIN ROAD
I have walked you backwards
every day since
the fountain
flowed.
I am the hunched one.
NINEVEH.
Artist
backwards [I was young]
I walked into science.
My Granny loved to tell
how I could sleep whilst still standing:
an ability that I lost before
my Granny died.
I can still walk backwards
and I can still hear my Granny.
I tip-toed into the arts
where algorithms gave way to
adventure.
Let me share this story one day
Omphalos:
the
only
physical
connection
of our lives.
from our beginning
we
become.
A Humble Gate
At Bovaglia,
Rachel opened a gate:
a gate to the mountains.
The passer-through smiled in thanks,
and Rachel smiled back.
Two smiles.
At a gate to the mountains.
HALE BOPP
Andrew, you beat the drum,
for others less fortunate.
Andrew, you fly the night:
‘second to the right, and straight on till morning’
Andrew, you caught a star:
Charlotte.
A poem [in its passing]
A logical thinker [few have your ability]
In ‘ABSTRACT’
[we met] [and fell in love]
Logically, we should not have fallen in love!
ABSTRACTION, abstraction.
In my waking dream
Teddy bears rule!
[Series I to infinity –
I am a Scott]
CHAMPION TREES
Yesterday, with the quick steps of our next hope
we returned to Tillybin,
where the present was vulnerable to the past.
The day before yesterday,
we returned to Crathes castle,
where in less than a lifetime
saplings have become ‘CHAMPION TREES’.
We were newly married, when I planted
‘our’ Goodnestone Spanish Chestnut tree.
In unspectated absence
it failed to thrive.
But joy, the Field Maples, that we also planted less than a lifetime ago
are now CHAMPION!
How ‘long ago’ it is, that almost by chance,
this ‘gifted gardener’ fell in love with a byordinar’ lass!
Together, we filled Tillybin with patterns of love.
Patterns, that if you know where to look,
still grow strong in the green of today.
There has always been so much sky around Tillybin.
We need no reminding of this!
It is in the green.
It is time to go Sian
for us to leave Tillybin.
Champion Trees are growing in our garden.
Thirty years of summer skies
Years before our Italian petimus,
In the corridor of Woodend Hospital
You passed me by.
I was more than half-melted already.
Open-hearted and open-handed
you boldly met me halfway,
more than halfway.
Thirty summers have faded,
since those Woodend days in the DOME
[the Department of Medicine for the Elderly].
Still you hold my hand
and take me to Eden.
Yesterday, on a quiet Sunday in June
you took me to another Eden:
to the brig that spans the Deveron, at Alvah.
You guided me there by a forgotten byway,
lined, baith sides, by majestic, ancient and glorious trees.
We stopped, repeatedly, to read almost indecipherable aboroglyphs
carved into the tree trunks by
young lovers of yesteryears.
And then, through light-dappled leaves,
in the freshest of green,
almost transparently so,
the Brig o’ Alvah.
What a wonder.
A wonder in any world!
There together,
standing on the bridge,
with the river flowing below us
here and there sparkling,
in quiet pools, outwith the eddies,
we could see brief reflections of the sky above us.
The immeasurably deep sky.
AGAPANTHUS., n., a genus of plants of the Lily family.
The day I married more than you
you outshone all that Lily beauty.
I knew that day
that I could not be your equal.
Humbled, beautifully so,
encouraged to be free
to be the Peter you love.
Thank you Sian,
for being my advisory thunderbolt.
Together have we realised what the Greeks always knew:
the best form of education is collaborative.
F E R R Y
Those different coloured chalks
Eyes that blazed before she was born
Those different coloured chalks
Years and years have poured into these moments
Those different coloured chalks
There are no degrees to amazement
This poem is for Rachel, who lives in Broughty Ferry [‘Ferry’]. The coloured chalks refer to Rachel, her mum, her Grandma and her great Grandma, all of whom were Dux of their respective schools.
Grandma’s Last Night
Pirouetting on her doorstep
Grandma asked:
‘What is Dark matter?’
We had no answer –
we repeated what we had read:
‘It is 95% unknown’
Then it was time to go, always time to go –
Grandma waved to us from the window.
Footnotes, forget-me-nots: Apparently, after first meeting me, Grandma said to Sian ‘You have brought a schoolboy home’.
L U C A
You are old now
your eccentricities
outstrip your age.
However grey your fur gets
it will always be ‘superior fur’!
However croaky your MIAOW becomes
we will hear you.
S T R O K E
In a stroke
a father
finally met
his son
My father had a stroke on the 2nd November 2023. He nearly did not survive. He has shown such fortitude in living with this and the resulting complete loss of independence. There can be no ‘silver-lining’ to a stroke but my father and I now have a new relationship where we connect emotionally. We still do not understand each other as we might wish but each time I visit him in Thorburn Manor Care Home we say to each other ‘we can talk now’.
T R E E T O P S
The ‘Class of 1990’ Graduation Ball,
the Treetops Hotel, Aberdeen.
Yet, I was in the stinging undergrowth:
h u r t i n g –
no Marigold gloves
could protect me.
In the DOME
Sian reached out
for my hand
pulling me back into the
T R E E T O P S
TONNES
Gardens, seek and follow
the natural rhythms,
Nature the only guide.
I have helped nature make
gardens for Sian.
Tonnes of earth
wheelbarrowed,
for Cimbrone,
together, towards, reaching
agapanthus,
sky.
Mother and daughter
radiant,
Same as they ever were!
brilliant,
Same as they ever were!
