The Magicians of Scotland
Page 3
We’ll make the Hogmanay bells ring all year,
and Hogmanay kisses last forever.
Professor Peter Higgs’ prediction of the particle that could almost be said to hold the universe together, was validated at CERN in Switzerland. The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Professor Higgs Throws the Biggest Party Since the Big Bang
No alchemy at CERN, no sorcery, no spells –
particle acceleration only. Electron shells
stronger than our planet’s gravity were split,
shattered … asked to spill
their treasure trove of muons, strange and charm.
Elementary, you might have said – until
Professor Higgs threw the biggest party since
the Big Bang!
4 July 2012.
At last, after millions, billions,
trillions of invitations Higgs boson shows up.
Shy, elusive, but statistically there.
At this, the CERN Collider and the universe itself
become as one. Whirling atoms
and the turning wheel of stars
stand integrated –
revealing Creation’s utter certainty
and grace.
Dr. James Simpson [1811-70] and his colleagues experimented on
themselves to discover a drug that would relieve the agonies that
accompanied all surgery, particularly childbirth.
Sir James Simpson Sets Foot on a New Planet
Simpson’s mother screamed and screamed and
screamed until –
Thirty-six years later the clock that measures out
human love and hope, human pain
and suffering as a beating heart,
a pulse, breath,
slowed down …
and almost …
stopped
at the kitchen table of 52 Queen Street, Edinburgh,
4 November 1847
()
then started up again next morning…
… less than a single tick later
when Simpson came to, lying tumbled
on his flag-stoned kitchen floor.
Recovered heartbeat, involuntary breathing,
a pulse –
Painless death, painless resurrection.
*
From outside there’s the sound of rain battering
the darkness and an east wind
howling a path between the bare branches
and iron railings
of Queen Street Gardens.
In a previous world, his long-dead mother
has at last stopped screaming.
Simpson gazes round at the new
and so much kinder planet
that he’s landed on.
‘Chloroform! Blessed, blessed chloroform!’
Getting to his feet, he takes that first small step …
While walking on Salisbury Crags, James Hutton [1726-97] came across rock formations that seemed to contradict Bishop Ussher’s accepted chronology of the world’s creation in 4,004 BC. Hutton, ‘the Father of Geology’, published his findings during the years when the French Revolution was at its bloodiest.
James Hutton Learns to Read the Hieroglyphics of the Earth
Woken once too often by the rattle-clatter
of tumbril wheels on cobbles, the click … click …
click of distant knitting needles,
James Hutton decided never to go
to sleep again.
Then, by the light of several Edinburgh Council moons
(spares, in case the heavens were taken over
by the church), he tip-toed past storm-wrecked
Holyrood Abbey, went striding down
unimagined corridors,
through undreamt-of walls and doors where
Scottish Hope would one day
be cemented into place
(the bars across its parliament windows
wooden, just in case).
The Park … Salisbury Crags …
where several hundred million years ago,
the Earth had cracked itself wide open –
*
Detailed as a map of Man’s undiscovered self,
zigzag Time lies flat-packed,
for everyone to see …
Stacked magma, olivine, dolerite chilled to glass,
eternity crushed to lines of slowly
spelled-out hieroglyphics, and cut
in blood-red haematite.
… and Hutton sees it. He’s the first!
First to know he walks upon an ancient ocean floor
(God’s Flood, the merest puddle in all that vastness).
First to hear the stone-hard heartbeat pound-pound-pounding out Existence.
Elsewhere, Revolution has taken to the streets
with an accusation and a scream,
a guillotine-swish …
French clocks run backwards to Year One.
Sunday 23rd October 4,004 bc?
All in the blink of a biblical eye! says Hutton.
*
Meanwhile, you and I continue turning
on our axis to the tick …
tick … tick of Time that never
started Once upon a …
And will surely never, ever –
Ah, these strata, these infinities glimpsed between!
Tony Blair has sincerity stamped on his forehead, a brand name. There is an uncanny resemblance to the finely sculptured eagle glaring down at us from the plinth of the Melville Monument in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh.
Tony Blair’s Butterfly Effect
Having glided smoothly upwards –
Up…!
And up . . !
And up . . !
Behold, Tony Blair standing where he should be –
poised sixty years and more above
the city of his birth.
Time enough for down-soft feathers to have stiffened
into archangel-strength wings,
time enough to curve himself a profile
of absolute conviction, take on
a gaze of stone-hard sincerity.
Set so high above the rest of us, he hears
God whisper to him,
personally.
Any moment now, the ex-PM might feel the need to stretch.
Beware!
Tony Blair’s butterfly effect – when these wings beat,
distant city walls tumble,
men, women and children die.
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder is one of Britain’s finest living artists. Her meticulous work satisfies both traditional and contemporary taste, restoring our faith in genuine creativity.
The Kinder Artist
Mornings unroll as unprimed, untrimmed canvas.
New-splashed colours drying out too soon
harden into lives.
Each city street’s a portrait gallery we walk through.
God the Artist keeps himself well-hidden,
as well He might –
He has a lot to answer for.
Not just His recent winter palette
of sleet and rain, of day after day
slate-and-tenement grey …
but the casual painting-over of anyone
whose time, He likes to think,
is done.
*
Not so another artist, less ambitious,
and therefore kinder.
With her brushstroke sunlight yellows,
reds, vermilions, she offers flowers
(all in a moment’s grace that could be
ours, if we allowed)
and cats who put us comfortably
in our place, knowing
they will outlive us.
Given their breathing-space of canvas,
Koi carp and kimonos are restored to life.
Hers is creation we can trust.
Remembering a Good Friend
(for Gavin W.)
No history but what we take for granted. Our lives are
as already read – and here’s the writing on the wall.
We wrote it.
We always do.
No sanctuary for you till now.
All we shared seems all we’ll ever know.
How can this be?
How can any of this be?
On 17 August 1513, a Scottish army of 30,000 men, made up of conscripted farmworkers and labourers for the most part, was assembled in Edinburgh to march down into England. With James IV at their head, they ended up at Flodden.
A Gaitherin O Scottish Men
Scottish kings, Scottish lairds, chieftans, gentry …
No that mony gin they’re coontit up –
a few score tae a generation.
Scotland’s history, sae we’re telt.
The likes o you an me? Fit-sodgers maistly,
mairchin … mairchin doon the years
whiles daein oor best tae no get killed
afore oor time.
Oor enemies? Ither kings, lairds, chieftans an gentry –
they’ll rape oor wummen
an eat oor weans.
Sae we’re telt.
*
King James is a guid an glorious king –
he daes things grand-style!
Holyrood Palace, re-biggin the Castle, stairtin up
the surgeons an the Navy.
He’s sortit us oot grand-style tae –
Mons Meg hurlin daith a guid twae mile,
fower hunner ox tae puu the guns
an save oor strength
fer whit’s tae come.
There’s thirty thoosan o us gaithered here,
aa facin Sooth, an thoosans mair
tae whisky us
an bed us on the road …
At oor heid’s a kingly king we’ll mairch fer, kill fer,
dee fer if we hivtae!
Mairch aa the wey … an mair.
We’re a richt-fou rantin roar o Scottish men, shair
this yince tae mak history fer oorsels –
a history that’ll be oor ain!
My grandfather was severely wounded in the war, and there was a great shortage of pain-relieving medicines. He suffered agonies in the weeks that followed, only to die on the day peace was declared. This poem was read during the BBC’s WW1 commemoration programme.
My Grandfather Dreams Twice of Flanders
My grandfather dreamt he was trying hard to die
and no one would help him.
He dreamt he went walking across Flanders field,
and he saw the companies of dead men
whose screaming he still hears night after night.
The countryside was a woman dressed in red.
He saw her courted briefly by a million men
carrying bayonets and mortars – her face
turning towards his, turned his to stone
and made the white clouds whirl dizzily overhead.
My grandfather dreamt that he was six years old
and a woman decked in flowers or blood
was guiding him to Flanders field –
he saw ungathered poppies scattered on the floor,
and the ceiling tilting crazily,
and the lights swaying.
Shadows tumbling out of the darkness
beckoned him everywhere.
He saw her heaping flowers into a bed.
Then one by one she took the shadows
to lie with her, and one
by one he saw them disappear.
Robert Burns [1759-96] ended his life as a poet-cum-Customs and Revenues officer in Dumfries which, like many Scottish towns, enjoys a vigorous Planning Dept. and a road system that is being constantly upgraded.
Robert Burns’ First Poem For More Than 200 Years
Robert Burns’ house was put on this earth
without planning permission –
no wheelchair access, fire doors!
No extractor fans!
For the next two centuries, intergalactic rubble
fell from the sky forming government buildings,
Planning departments. Administration.
Nearby, in St. Michael’s kirkyard, the dead
rose from their graves to sit on committees,
consider applications and appeals.
Red and green men ruled the streets.
The River Nith silted up, and wept.
*
Today, fresh tar lapping its front steps,
and freshly-painted single, double,
triple yellow lines patrolling
its foundations, Burns’ House knows
it’s time to move on.
Avoiding anyone who tarmac our paths
into the future,
it navigates the one-way streets, No Entries
and contraflows.
Gatecrashes the ring road carouselling the town …
Accelerates into open country.
*
Robert Burns has long dreamt the moment
of his resurrection:
The first words of his first poem for more than 200 years
will be written in streaks of light
across the morning sky.
Creation waits to be renamed.
Rev. Alexander Peden [1626-86], also known as Prophet Peden, was a leading figure in the Covenanter movement. A hunted man, he preached in the open air and died while still on the run. The mask and wig he needed as disguise can be seen in the National Museum of Scotland.
Prophet Peden Rattles The Prison Bars Of The 21St Century
Long before the moment of his birth he’d climbed
a stone-slabbed stairway rising
from the planet’s core.
The sometimes layered sometimes molten rock, was all
the certainty he knew and needed.
God’s Word mapped out the darkness –
a braille of clustered minerals, crystals,
precious stones.
Emerging at last into daylight.
Entering this roofless church, the earth.
*
From his crow’s nest of a pulpit, Prophet Peden scans
the perpetual ebb and flow of mountain,
glaciated valley, moorland
(eternity has no shore to break upon,
not here).
We’ve assembled under open skies as on
God’s outstretched palm,
our skin flayed to rawness
by the Scottish wind and rain –
Raising his arms to the heavens, Peden drives us forward.
Forward! Forward!
Until … .
*
What unnamed continent is this? What century,
discovered upon whose unsteady palm (which might
at any moment clench into a fist,
to crush us all)?
As always, those who know are quick to tell us, quick
to help us navigate this ever-brand-new,
ever-better world.
We post our plans on Facebook,
tweet our feelings, our beliefs … Whatever.
We Favourite what matters most.
Retweet.
Our personal professional consumer profiles
are updated every hour.
We’re LinkedIn, we’re empowered!
Our enemies are quarantined safely
from our sight. Their severed nerves electrified.
The drowned are drowned over.
Guantanamo, Long Ketch, Auschwitz, Camp 16 …
So many Calvaries to nail down conscience
on a daily basis.
We live in God’s name, any god at all
whose blood flows thick enough
and black enough to serve
in the holy sacraments of Wall Street,
the Square Mile, Frankfurt, Beijing.
His litanies are the Nikkei, Dax, Dow Jones …
*
Prophet Peden
rattles prison bars that
only he can see –
invisible breeze-block walls
and locked doors
guard against the threat of freefall.
A Covenant – here?
And so, back to that ice-hardened winter afternoon,
late January 1686, the parish of Sorn.
Back to that frozen riverbank, trampled-grass path,
that dripping cave –
Stone bed bracken pillow God’s stairway
leading him down … down … down …
While on convalescence at Craiglockart Hospital from wounds
sustained on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen [1893-1918] decided
to return to his company. He was killed a week before the Armistice.
Wilfred Owen Reads Between the Lines
Advance two steps / back two steps …
Breathless mouths get stopped with mud.
Advance two steps / back two steps …
*
Our generation’s on the terrace sitting
the next dance out,
chairs lined up to catch the Scottish sun.
Below, a goods train trundles its clank of wagons
westwards into the future …
Then it’s gone.
Edinburgh’s at our feet. Because of railway soot
and chimney smoke, I can hardly see the Castle,
St Giles’ Cathedral, Calton Hill.
How much clearer, the Forth Rail Bridge,
the coast of Belgium,
the distant fields of France …
The impossibly young nurse who heals
each wounded day, takes
my hand in hers.
Turns it over.
‘These palm lines show,’ she tells me, ‘what
will surely …’
And how lightly she traces out the track
of each approaching bullet.
The smog-yellow drift of gas.
A mortar shell’s sudden THUD full-stop.
There’s barbed-wire laughter as the flesh
and muscle’s ripped from
bloodied bone,
letting us clamber up to heaven.
A company of angels soaring
into the ever-blue –
Advance two steps / back two steps …
Breathless mouths get stopped with mud.
Advance two steps / back two steps …
This is a dance I know I will not live through.
All That We Have
Before I’d learned to speak I heard and saw only
what there was, and all there was
was enough.
So many years and so much understanding
later, I catch sight of you applying
a touch of lipstick, say,
or leaning forward to brush your red hair …
And the longing for all we cannot have
and all that we do have,
still overwhelms.
MAGIC FOR ALL
The result of the Scottish referendum on Independence has ensured that Trident remains based in Scotland. For the continued comfort and security of us all, so we’re told.