by Edwin Morgan
In half-belief ‘Is this all for me?’
The reward of gratitude is a star in dark skies.
You cannot always help but trying is the crux.
I well remember that old alky Bill
Who shared his hovel of a house with others;
They held him prisoner among the litter
Of needles and syringes and empty bottles
Waiting to be smashed on social workers.
Another place for Bill? – possible,
But he’s a bloody mess from fights at the moment.
We don’t give up, that nothing is easy
Makes it even better not to give up.
Everyone alive is subject to change.
Hope lies where you least expect it.
Take exclusion from school, or rather don’t take it!
Sandra, a so-called impossible child,
Made sure each class was disrupted to breaking-point.
Yelling, hitting, throwing chairs about,
Was she getting what she wanted,
Did she know what she wanted,
Was it ‘What is to be done with her?’
Or rather ‘What has been done to her?’
She was a child abused, her mother on drugs,
She had become a ‘case’, found caring arms
In social services alone, and there
Not only care but cure: a worker assigned
To be with her throughout school, helping, calming,
A bridge of sympathy between teacher and pupil,
A dedication not all that far from love.
Homelessness is terrible, but a home
Without love is almost equally so.
We watch, we measure, we praise whatever
Society can do, given the means and the people
To unknot fearful twists of fate, each day
Brings more, and if we are powerless
We cry out in our powerlessness.
If we are to blame, then we are to blame;
Fair treatment is what we ask.
My friends,
There is always without doubt a worst case,
And it is so bad because it is so rare,
Call it the dark night of the carer’s soul.
Here you have Carl, supreme in cunning,
Known to have a personality disorder,
But showing the social team ‘continued improvement’:
Ah what a quiet mockery he made
Of schizophrenia! This man, however,
Took a claw hammer to his next victim’s head,
Fried his brain with butter and ate it –
‘Very nice,’ he said. And unpredictable
One might add, although social workers
Would still have nightmares, thinking, shivering –
What was needed other than what they had,
Vigilance to the last degree, happy recall
Of those so many they had helped, brought back
To life with faith and hope blessedly renewed.
Oh if you ever thought we were not required,
Workers on the very edge of despair,
Consider Joe, kicked out by foster-carers
At twelve, having stolen from the little they had:
‘Ah don’t know why Ah done it, but it’s okay
If they didny wahnt me back, it’s okay –
My ma didny wahnt me either.’ To live
In such unquestioned acceptance of defeat
Is dreadful, yet we know Joe can be helped.
The value of a soul can be drawn out
By those who are trained to do so, those
Who can blow the tiniest downtrodden spark
Of self-esteem into flame. You drop a tear
In instant sympathy or you are filled
With anger against systems and perpetrators,
And this is good and fine and natural.
But change is all the practicalities
Of learning, funding, understanding, change
Is everything we believe to be possible,
Whatever the squalor and sickness and stink.
There will never be a paradise with people like angels
Walking and singing through forests of music,
But let us have the decency of a society
That helps those who cannot help themselves.
It can be done; it must be done; so do it.
The Old Man and E.A.P.
He is not sleeping, though you might think so.
His eyes are half shut against the light.
‘An old man’s nap.’ They smile, walk softly on.
He is smiling too, but mentally.
Without a twitch, he is on dragonback
above Edgarallanwood – what’s in a name –
getting ready to rein in on the low moon.
It was a certain very dark exhilaration
played invisibly along his lips,
or a dark pride in riding such a beast
perched among its spikes and rolling folds
as it swished through cypresses, topped them,
kicked them, flicked them with a thundery tail
out below back down into men and
all that, last dog-walk of the day, hurrying,
whistle and whoop through Edgarallanwood.
He is full of questions, this man who is not sleeping.
Ever since the Fall of the House of Answer –
what’s in a name – he has kept a brace
of dragons, dangling like markers in a diary,
whiffling at him as if they had the speech
of old times; he listens, hard, hard,
asks them in all the languages he knows
if there was a day, if there could have been a day,
if there was ever a night or a day
when they conversed with human kind, guarded
on terms of equality with ungreedy heroes
the well-locked unimaginable treasuries
laid up from times still older, and what
oh what would those times have been like, he asks.
The dragon’s ear is dumb; it blinks; it hits
the moon, its wings are white with dust, the ages
dissolve in airless silence. Go on, bark,
last dog of evening, open the man’s eyes.
‘Had a good nap?’ He smiles. ‘Better than that:
I sprang a tale of mystery and imagination.’
An Old Woman’s Birthday
That’s me ninety-four. If we are celebrating
I’ll take a large Drambuie, many thanks,
and then I’ll have a small one every evening
for the next six years. After that – something quick
and I’ll be off. A second century doesn’t entice.
When I was a girl, you thought you would live for ever.
Those endless summer twilights under the trees,
sauntering, talking, clutching a modest glass
of grampa’s punch diluted to suit young ladies –
diluted? It didn’t seem so! The crafty old man
loved to see us glowing, certainly not swaying
but just ever so slightly, what do you say, high.
Life put all that away. I drove an ambulance
through shells, ruins, mines, cries, blood,
frightful, days of frightfulness who could forget?
It is not to be dwelt on; we do what we can.
If this is hell, and there is no other,
we are tempered, I was tempered – fires, fires –
I was a woman then, I was not broken.
No angel either; the man I married knew that!
Well, we had our times. What are quarrels for
but to make amends, get stronger. We did, we were.
He is gone now. I don’t have a budgie in a cage
but I am one, and if you want me to sing
it will take more than cuttlebone and mirror:
more than Drambuie: mo
re than if there was ever
good news out of Iraq where my ambulance
would keep me day and night without sleep:
more than what I say here, sitting
waiting for my son to come and see me
perhaps with flowers, chocolate, a card,
oh I don’t know, he is late, he is ill,
he is old, I forget his heart is worse
than mine, but still, I know he’ll do his best.
You really want me to sing? Come on then,
you sing first, then a duet, I love a duet.
For David Daiches, on his Ninetieth Birthday
‘He must be ninety if he’s a day’ –
That’s what I heard Methuselah say
As he scoured the Internet with a glint
(Not nine hundred yet though, eh?).
‘The boy is coming on. Let’s print
Congratulations in hard copy,
Nothing stinted, nothing sloppy!’
David in his youth combined
Dreams of an undivided mind,
Sprezzatura of the chanter
Solemn sadness of the cantor.
Travelling salesmen spliced his ears
Like weird Scots-Yiddish balladeers:
‘Aye man, ich hob’ getrebbelt mit
De midday train.’ A fuse was lit
To language, culture, history, nation,
Whatever needed validation
Circled by imagination.
He swept up Burns, Fergusson, Scott,
And Andrew Fletcher who cursed the knot
Of Union, cursed his land and told it
‘Was only fit for the slaves who sold it’.
The spirit of that land survived
In senses you may think contrived,
But David takes this in his stride
And casts his net both deep and wide.
A spirit well distilled, unique,
Fragrant as mist, treasure to seek –
David has pressed this in his book.
Beside the Taj Mahal he shook
The moonlight with a classic swig:
Glenlivet, rosier than the Rig-
Veda to a wanderer’s soul!
Keep our tempers hale and whole!
David, but not our David, danced,
We are told, before the Lord
With all his might, like one entranced,
In a white smock without a cord,
While shouts and trumpets brought the ark
To blare and brilliance from the dark.
Our David wanted to throw light
On many: got them in his sight
As critic, not to shoot them down
Or crack their brows into a frown
Of Derridean doubts – or douts.
He set small store by sparring-bouts
But targeted coherences.
He gave MacDiarmid, Milton, Moses
More than flash appearances;
There was a web, a net, a gnosis
That could not be described, but felt,
Whatever Queens of Spades were dealt.
David, your friends are gathered here
To celebrate your latest year
Within a life led well and long.
This is a poem, not a song,
But you may hear it like the dear
Strains King David danced among.
A Birthday: for I.H.F.
It is no use offering the gatekeeper a garland of seventy-nine rhododendron petals. He can count.
Do not waste your time showing the guardian of the grove a pretty pretty book of eighty-one amorous pictures.
And as for that album of seventy-eight famous executions, keep it for the next bonfire.
If you are ever tempted to photograph a convocation of eighty-two midges thin with hunger and thirst, forget it.
Or if the cosmetic surgeon from Giacometti & Co. promises to make you a new man on payment of only seventy-seven pounds sterling, turn your pockets out with a shrug.
But when at last you come across the ship with eighty sails, oh what a sight that is to take to heart, with the white canvas flapping and the rigging snapping as she churns the ocean through a stiff breeze, and the sailors sing out their seemingly inexhaustible store of shanties, and the dolphins slice and gleam and are ahead of the prow like protective things from a world that is not quite ours, and the playful captain out of sheer joy blasts his horn eighty times into the misty morning, and then with his blue eyes glittering he bangs the rail – ‘Steady as she goes!’
Wild Cuts
by Edwin Morgan and Hamish Whyte
Natural Philosophy
The dim shadow
of the thing
was but a blur
against the dim shadows
of the woods behind it.
A Bird Too Many
Notwithstanding
his suffering
he found himself smiling
as he contemplated the remnant
of his long-suffering
ducks.
Sure of a Big Surprise
She dared not again
tempt fate
in the gloomy wood
by night.
A Drip Too Many
About it the liquids of
decomposition had killed
vegetation, leaving the thing
alone in all its grisly
repulsiveness as though shocked
nature had withdrawn in terror.
Soothe and Improve
He knew little more of savage dances
than his tribesmen did
of the two-step and the waltz;
but he knew that dancing
and song and play
marked in themselves
a great step upward.
A Whizz Too Many
A haze obscured his vision –
everything became black – his brain
was whizzing about at frightful velocity
within the awful darkness of his skull.
Last Days
man moved less rapidly
and as he went
he looked now for a burrow
into which he might crawl
A Movement Too Many
Presently the smoke came out,
as I have told you,
and the cliff went away
toward the edge of the world.
But they are all dead now.
(Found poems from Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Cave Girl, 1913)
Five Paintings
Salvador Dali: Christ of St John of the Cross
It is not of this world, and yet it is,
And that is how it should be.
Strong light hits back and the arms
Coming from where we cannot see,
Ought not to see, another dimension
For another time. At this time, we
Share the life of bay and boat
With simply painted fishermen
Who would give no Amen
Even if clouds both apocalyptic and real
Made them look up and feel
What they had to feel
Of shattering amazement, fear,
Protection, and a wash of glory.
Was it an end coming near?
Was it a beginning coming near?
What happened to the thorns and blood and sweat?
What happened to the hands like claws the whipcord muscles?
Has the artist never seen Grünewald?
‘I have to tell you John of the Cross called,
Said to remind you light and death once met.’
Sir Henry Raeburn: Portrait of Rev. Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch
The skating minister is well balanced
And knows it. Something distinctly smug
Keeps those arms in place. Wouldn’t it be good
If the god of thaws pulled that icy rug
From under him, to remind his next sermon
What it is tha
t goeth before a fall.
He shivers before the fire
Hunched in his wife’s mocking shawl –
Not the thing at all!
Rembrandt: Man in Armour
No warrior here.
This is a man who has put on some armour
In the cause of art. No enemy is near,
The helmet is well burnished and no doubt,
If tapped, gives off a musical note.
It would certainly not
Smudge hand or glove with caked or dusty blood.
If the man is faintly smiling, that would fit.
Rembrandt, man, everyone will love it.
Bring back your son, yourself, the woman at her bath,
And we’ll use words like masterpiece again,
A cupboard is the best place for jingle-jangle.
Oh it’s well done: the head looms out of darkness
With all the accoutrements bar pain.
You are great; even a loss from you’s a gain.
But do not trivialise the death of men.
Joan Eardley: Flood-Tide
Lonely people are drawn to the sea.
Not for this artist the surge and glitter of salons,
Clutch of a sherry or making polite conversation
See her when she is free:
Standing into the salty bluster of a cliff-top
In her paint-splashed corduroys,
Humming as she recalls the wild shy boys
She sketched in the city, allowing nature’s nations
Of grasses and wild shy flowers to stick
To the canvas they were blown against
By the mighty Catterline wind –
All becomes art, and as if it was incensed
By the painter’s brush the sea growls up
In a white flood.
The artist’s cup
Is overflowing with what she dares
To think is joy, caught unawares
As if on the wing. A solitary clover,
Unable to read WET PAINT, rolls over
Once, twice, and then it’s fixed,
Part of a field more human than the one
