Month: August 2024

This is one of a few poems I have written in the Scots tongue – it just flows so much better.

Maya Angelou said this: “My name is Maya Angelou. I grew up on dirt roads… I was a mute. I was poor and black and female. The only key I had which would open the door to the world for me was a book. I read everything. I fell in love with poetry. And amazingly in a small village in Arkansas, I met Robert Burns.”

Whit can we dae wi sic a tender pairin’ as Burns and Maya Angelou?
She kens weel why the caged bird sings
He turned o’er the mouse’s hame and stood stondstill stairin’
At the fear that destitution brings
She sang tae all wi ears tae hear of things unknown but longed for still
With ivery picture in her ivery tale she keept her eyes upon the prize
She said ‘take my mouse’s earth but still, like dust I’ll rise’.

Hey Robin, she micht hae called ye oot on mony fronts
Just one poem aboot slavery and slaves?
She micht hae asked why you let your crazed an passionate waves
Sweep lovers oot tae sea, who loved but once and loved forever.
But she never.
She never thocht you should be retro-fitted to oor age
Or asked why you didna see where her birds were caged.
She kent weel that callin auld acquaintance back to mind
Is what keeps us humankind.

Oh Robert, for all that ye were such a catch,
I think with Maya you’d have found your match

This poem comes out of an evening in Cambridge organised by Palestinians, Jews and others, where we shared music and dance and discussed the terrible events in the Middle East. At it Rowena and I sang words from Seamus Heaney’s poem The Cure at Troy which I had put to music. We sang ‘believe in miracles, and trust in cures and healing wells’ but also that ‘no poem, or play, or song can fully right a wrong’. In this light, I was moved to write this poem. There is reference to the Cure at Troy and also to Yeats’ The Second Coming in verse two. I fear I am not always better than my primal self.

That further Shore
Believe that further shore is reachable from here
(Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy)

We arrived in this world by chance,
But chance need not be all we know.
We are better than our primal selves,
Conviction need not bare its snarling teeth
Like a wolf knowing only fury,
Glaring at what was once the Holy Land.

Instead, this evening, we gather in this hall
With all our differences in view.
In many accents, welcome words are said,
Our teeth close not on each other
But gently on fresh bread,
Songs are sung, dancers dance.
For a moment we are less fearful of the rough beast,
Slouching towards Bethlehem.

No poem turns a wrong into a right,
No song removes dead children from our sight,
No dance gives us back our broken minds.
But there, and then, we were in a different place,
Our lips were moist from healing wells
We shared the taste of cures,
As we walked into the night,
My hand gripped yours,
And our fingers touched that further shore.