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J O H N S T O N E W R I T E R S G R O U P |
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TWO POEMS by Jack Hastie
BEING DEAD I think having to draw breath was what killed me. That`s OK. I knew it would happen sooner or later. Had plenty of time to prepare for it. As I survey my six sided pine coffin I feel a certain satisfaction; a smug glow of superiority, actually After all I was right all the time; there isn`t any God or Heaven or Hell. At my funeral I could hear them talk. I knew they`d respected my last wish, no sycophantic Victorian hymns "All things bright and beautiful," I mean I`m surrounded here by eariwigs and worms. "All creatures squat and foul All things sharp and harmful The Lord God made them all." And I could tell there wasn`t a minister You can detect their rant even inside a coffin. Afterwards I could sense being lowered into the grave like going down in a lift and I think someone said she would plant daffodils over my head. I don`t think my grandchildren Mark and Amber were there They were only six at the time. That was how many years ago? It`s quite comfortable in here. I sleep a lot, so don`t get bored. I don`t have to worry about getting promotion meeting deadlines getting a dizzy when I thought I had a date Christ, how many decades ago was that? And of course I don`t have that stabbing pain any more. Don`t need to draw breath. So it`s a case of "After life`s fitful fever " I`ve a lifetime`s memories to replay on the video of the mind; enough to keep me amused for eternity. I never thought of a tomb as a video replay shop but here`s my Dad play ing football with me when I was ten. He died when I was eighteen. I think I`ll have another nap now. Then perhaps I`ll watch Saint Mirren winning the cup in 1987, or turn up the sound and hear the bouzouki music at Zorba`s taverna in Corfu. Afterwards I`ll rewind the tape and see again the little red fire engine I got for my fourth birthday when I was sick. I`ve got almost all I need here. Almost. But my grandson, Mark will graduate this year. My beautiful Amber is to be married soon. I won`t be there.
TOWNHEAD In the beginning was Townhead at the top of the High Street above the Old College. And Townhead was with God. The lancing windows of Blacader`s cathedral and the insistent obelisks urns, columns cliches of the braggart merchant dead in the Necropolis crowned and sanctified the place. But Townhead was not God. The steam-driven, profit-pistoned loins of the Industrial Revolution had spawned files of gruel-grey Presbyterian tenements Dobbie`s Loan, John Knox Street stacked single-ends swarming like termite towers with Calvin`s predestined damned. Here I was indentured Monday to Friday as a day labourer light denied. Till, soft like a newly hatched crab I secreted a carapace grew claws that could decapitate and learned to shuffle sideways. The Saturday early morning bus from Gallowgate plodded to pre-dawn Motherwell Cross. Then, as the day hatched open trotted through Lanark and Law cantered by Thankerton, Symington Lamington, Abington galloped into Biggar in the pearl morning and stammered to a stop outside Toftcombs stables a Hilton of horses. Hugh the groom was always there velvet voiced whisperer to horses. With him and his gun dog, Swan I startled a hundred rabbits detonated a thousand firework grouse exploding from heather. Together we deceived suspicious trout slunken in the umber caverns of the Biggar Water. Danced Drops o` Brandy on Saturday nights with wild, eager girls from Broughton or, long after closing time through the old gold of single malts looked at the thistle with another Hugh - Himself, the MacDiarmaid. But it was for the horses that I came. With thunder in their thighs hammers in heels they strode in straight lines forward. Hugh drew all his wisdom from the horses murmured in their ears as he saddled them read their lips as he bridled them understood, when they breathed on his wrists as he soothed the bit into their rubber mouths. Each touch of the rein on the neck squeeze of his heel to the flank spoke to them. And their pricked ears blowing nostrils soft whinneying told him as much as can be understood by those who are not horses. We would ride out under a flayed sky stamping on the skull of the shaven, sheep-cropped moor frantic with the ecstasy of being a horse - or an eagle for horses are the wings of men. The Sunday late night bus trudged from Toftcombs as ecstasy wept from the sky hauled its hearse past lunatic Carstairs, gateway to Glasgow in the tumbling darkness and shuddered into termite-damned Townhead. |