Serf’s Collar
The Cleaner
I always reach the collar around 9pm, give or take. I take my
time, watching cleaning fluid drizzling down the glass like rain,
transfixed.
‘Perpetuall servents’, the relic says. You and me both. My
calling (apparently) is to sweep cheese sandwich crumbs from museum
floors.
They found it in a river, your golden noose, your halo. But your
crime had washed away.
Bridget Hamilton
The Maiden
My name
My name is Maiden.
My body is iron-coloured oak
My heart twinned tackle and rope
No gentlemen can claim to pull on my strings sir.
A virgin no more
Quiver when I creak
Shudder when I break
And make nay a move when I fall
My name is Maiden
And if you let me, I’ll be the last lover you ever know.
Callum Heitler
Alexander Peden's mask and wig
Peden’s mask
Behind the mask
Once cleanish
I am now outlawed
With the rest of him
That never
saw
my church that was
rechristened for the
common good
I have
still
got my eye on
wee eck and
his cronies
the smelling
of blood of dead
sweaty stench of slavery
roughly
stitched gash
with teeth
the beard
man and vanity
Caroline Barr
Hilton of Cadboll stone
STANDING STONE
reaching for the stars
oh ya beauty
human vanity and human stupidity
recorded forever.
Yeah. Thanks for that.
tangled knots
webs of life
intermingling
it’s funny how stone seems alive.
Worship you?
not in this day and age,
thanks very much.
No-one likes a mystery.
Combs? Mirrors? There must be a scientific explanation.
After all, it’s just a lump of stone.
Right?
Elisabeth Flett
Queen Mary harp
The Song of the Woodworm
Does music flavour wood, even after so very long?
Imprisoned notes bleed into your burrows.
Echoes of voices whisper in the darkness;
The bragging, the songs, the weeping.
Do you form the traces into your own myths in your dark
halls?
Clothe the walls with memories
From the world outside your world, the harp?
What are your songs,
As you consume history?
Gill Arbuthnott
Suit of Ross tartan
Suit of Ross tartan
I proclaim my ancestors
You’re a medical student’s
fancy dress
I honoured a great king
The gouty alcoholic at the
street
party did not see you
I flaunt my cockade
and magnificent sporran
They’re a wee rosette of
ruched red
ribbon and a frustrated folded ferret
I travelled the world
You ran away. You
rushed
for Australian gold
I returned
We remained
Jane Cooper
Arthur’s Seat miniature coffins
The Burial of a Battalion
As the wind roared and the rain lashed,
As traders bartered and waves crashed,
A procession climbed the Seat.
Dressed in their weathered uniforms and metallic boots,
Solemnly, they lay in intricate boxes,
As onwards their owner carried them.
They’d fought to defend a hillside,
For a boy and a man named Arthur,
But had courageously lost,
And paid the ultimate price.
Jerry Moriarty
Silver travelling canteen
Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s silver travelling canteen, H.
MEQ 1584
“Kepple! Plucked this from the Caledonian mud. That upstart
Jacobite’s, I don’t doubt. Not bad, but not my sort of thing.
Confounding fiddly. Snuff more fitting to a man than nutmeg, in my
view. You’re one for the ladies, might be more your ‘quaich’, as
they say. Be a good chap and close the door after you. Good work,
by the way.”
Kyra Pollitt
Sporran clasp with four concealed pistols
Trigger
You: I wonder, do you remember me?
Me: (forlornly) I remember.
You: (with building aggression) How loudly I screamed and fought
for you?
Me: You left me all alone.
You: Nonsense, I was the loudest of both of us.
Me: Only because I was less than silent.
You: I was there. I tried. I was loaded and you failed to
pull.
Rebecca Harvey
Towie ball
BY THE BALLS
I’m cold. Sitting here with my legs open for all to see. The
light shining right in my… I need a hand. Please. Hold me. Fond
memories of hot fingers curling round my curves. The flame’s
shadows veiling my secret tattoos, revealing nothing. Pass me
around, I don’t care. The more the merrier. Hold me and you’re the
Big Man. For now.
Sarah Morrison
Westlothiana Lizziae
The Truth of the Matter’
So much is unknown
about ‘Lizzie the Lizard’.
The oldest-known reptile?
Amphibian? Or what?
So what do we know?
Ancient and then some
buried in Bathgate
a local lassie
or maybe a lad.
All that is certain is
geologists and grant-givers
bankers and biscuit makers
philatelists and oilmen
councils and curry lovers
and ‘many other donors’…
all helped bring ‘her’ to us.
Claire Allan
Lewisian gneiss
Rock on a Pedestal
Badger brindled,
buried below billions of years,
beneath worlds of weight.
Fire folded,
ridged by rain,
weathered by wind.
You are the ancestor rock.
You were here at the first,
and you are still here.
The molten melding,
the long slow cooling,
the ponderous shrug of continents.
Then. Now. They are nothing to you.
Brindled. Buried. Folded. Weathered.
You are still here.
Joan Lennon
Govan rent strike rattle
Rackety
The wooden clatter unites the people: the voice of law and
order. “Stop! Thief!” – stop the cutpurses and house-burglars. But
now the once voiceless wields this voice: Stop the cutpurses who
bleed us for our rent; the house-burglars who take our homes. Its
voice is not of comfort that tradition will survive but of hope for
a new city, a better world.
John Veitch