Poetry Doubles Plus Poems

Presenting newly commissioned work from poets taking part in the latest Poetry Doubles series...

This year Poetry Doubles features some the finest poets in Dumfries & Galloway reading alongside visiting writers with international reputations. Here’s a chance to sample the work of the D&G poets with new poems from each of them. You can also get the flavour of the readings by downloading poetry podcasts from many of them.

***
The Retired Headmaster

The retired headmaster with the teleprinter moustache
Stutters over his halving garden gate
He is guarding his territory
Putting out his story
To match his interlocutor’s

He told me he was a writer
But he didn’t want to meet another writer
He was no good at that
He put it on hold
He has nothing to print

John Manson

***
A guid catch

Ye went fishin theday,
an cam hame
wi a cucumber.

It lay on wir kitchen table,
lang an thin an cool,
kiddin oan it wis a fish.

Ye’d fun it
in the boot o the car,
missed fae the message bags.

Slicin it fir tea the night,
its wee green seeds
scalin oot like pearl beads,

tae wir widden table,
marked and carved
fae aw wir weddit years,

A’m lookin at its skin
still firm an fresh,
an emerald rollin pin.

An gien thanks
fir wir lucky catch
preserved against
that many odds.

Liz Niven

***
My Father

Fathers were good to all my pals
lectured them about money
then bought them flats,
had doubts about their morality

but flitted them from place to place
at dead of night.
Oh my Dad’ll go spare
they’d cheerfully admit

as they phoned for loans.
At such times
I would remember my own
and his two pieces of advice:

how to remove your bayonet
from an enemy’s ribcage,
and how to disarm a maniac
coming at you from the stairs.

They thought their fathers weird
for having cardigans,
I thought mine odd
because he’d talk to men

who’d burned alive in 1942
and because of other things
I’d watched him do:
vault walls three times his size,

or sprint along a busy street
to punch my Mum. When he went,
it left a hole as a trepan might.
I have no idea where he ended up

though I knew he would live long,
as mad folk do.
Years down the line
I received a sentence or two,

written in his cramped
and delicate monkish way,
I wonder, it began,
if you remember me…

Hugh McMillan

***
River Reading

Lecture les pied dans l’eau –
Lodeve, 30 July 2005

In the shade of a Roman bridge
three poets gather to read from the banking.

A congregation is seated in the river, their feet
bathed by the cool, sun-stroked water.

There’s gentle comedy
in wet trouser-cuffs, in poet-tasters

lifting their feet like oystercatchers
from the slippy riverstones. Soon after

the reading begins a welcome breeze clears
name-tags from the table, topples a parasol

into the water. The Greek poet
doesn’t miss a beat, even when

the raised parasol blesses her with water.
A frisky setter now lollops along the river:

a natural free-verser, on dry land
he moves among the latecomers

shaking up their forms. A woman
in a long white dress - who earlier

had bared it to her thigh merely
to dip her foot in the water –

gives a self aware but silent laugh.
And indeed this is all so very interesting

how can words, rhythm, image
keep up? In fact as one sonorous poem

follows another how can you not wish
for the vitality of the other?

So –

a fierce gust of wind lifts the table up,
turns it in mid-air, landing it

in the river like a raft. The small dog
the presenter has thoughtfully brought

yaps at the sight. The setter bounds
from the river like an avenging angel.
The wind

has lifted the white dress up
over the woman’s head: through its funnel

we now hear her laughter, as circuits break,
microphones fall silent and the borrowed words

one by one return to their origins –
in stones, in leaves, in water, in light.

Tom Pow

***
“What is trowth?”

Whit wey wis Kendall-Smith pitten awa,
Wis it no the trowth he spak,
Agin thon wrongous war oot in Iraq?
His faur-i-the-buik philosophie wis nae defence,
Whan Bayliss said “Naw, naw, ye maunna speik…..”
He fairly stapt up Plato’s learned mou.
Did he no hear the souch o black-burnin shame,
As it whispert owre the decades tae his lug,
‘Div ye no mind the lessons o Nuremburg?’
Or aiblins mibbes it’s o.k.
Fir servin sodgers juist tae say,
“Ah wis anely follaein orders”,
Cause eftir aa, ony excuse wull dae;
‘Gif it wisnae you, it must hae bin yer faither’.
God help us, Tony, sort oot richt frae wrang,
Thon deidly wappenschaw, it must be true,
Whit’s that Voltaire? “Fable convenue”?
Thon’s typical o a cynic lik you.
Nou, here’s Apollo, the hack frae the ‘SUN’,
‘C’mon boys, tak yer seats, the jury’s in’.
The shoutin owre, Bayliss washt his haunds;
Fined twenty graund – an eicht month in the jyle,
Certies Malcolm, it bates bein ‘Shot at dawn’.
Whiles nou ye’re oot – tho tagged an gagged,
But still ye’er no alloued tae speik yer mind.
Ach, ae day Malcolm, fowk’ll get tae hear,
We’ll easy thole anither twa-thoosan year.

Rab Wilson

***
Baton

I could be an Olympic runner
The way I carry this torch for you.
But where do you want me to take it.
Which politician’s backside
Do you want me to light up,
As if fire could illuminate the truth.

Or should I just stop running towards the impossibility
That any of our voices make a difference.
Go instead to the void, light up the forest,
Douse the flames in a loch I’m not locked into.
Take what remains of this flickering light
To the thin places hoping.

Judi Benson

***
Quack

The dog can bark,
the lion roar,
the crow will crow
and human snore.
- To each of them
returns the sound
on the (as it were)
rebound,
but once the duck
has made her quack
there’s no chance she will
get it back.
- The same, of course,
goes for the drake:
his quack is lost
and no mistake.
The duck can quack, then,
all she likes,
and quack and quack
with all her might,
and quack all day
and quack all night,
quack to the left,
quack to the right,
quack with joy
or quack in fright
- it doesn’t matter how she quacks,
she’ll never ever get it back.
Even something like a gecko
makes its hiss and it will echo.

No such luck if you’re a duck.

Douglas Lipton