#scottish poetry

[kmbgpoetry]

| Whorticulture | KMBG |

9-10 August 2024

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[flaxmanlow]

Tim Robertson, illustration for Grimoire by Robin Robertson

I remember the girl

with the hare-lip

down by Clachan Bridge,

cutting up fish

to see how they worked;

from By Clachan Bridge by Robin Robertson

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

Of Muthadh / Mutability

This book is for the taken: for all those feart of the glamour, the skaith of the evil eye - weird-set, ill-minted or only wildering - their bodies in motion, flowing or full-flown, rapt with heart-hunger.

Grass twists up through my hair now and my mouth is full of stones. Tell my mother and father I am coming, tell them I have not grown old.

Robin Robertson, from Grimoire

[poem-today]

A poem by Dorothy Lawrenson

September

This far north, the harvest happens late. Rooks go clattering over the sycamores whose shadows yawn after them, down to the river. Uncut wheat staggers under its own weight.

Summer is leaving too, exchanging its gold for brass and copper. It is not so strange to feel nostalgia for the present; already this September evening is as old

as a photograph of itself. The light, the shadows on the field, are sepia, as if this were some other evening in September, some other harvest that went ungathered years ago.

Dorothy Lawrenson

Dorothy Lawrenson writes: Landscape is the ostensible subject-matter for a lot of my work, whether visual art or poetry. For some time I had been wanting to write about that end-of-summer-but-not-quite-autumn time of year. So when my weekly poetry class was given the task of writing something using the passive voice, without the use of the word ‘I’, the subject was to hand and this poem was ready to be written.

[victusinveritas]

Hamish Henderson (1919–2002) was born on this day in 1919, 11 November. He was a hugely important and influential figure in Scottish culture, and beyond effective summary.

Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica:

First Elegy

Hamish Henderson

Published in From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945 (ASLS, 2014)

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/from_the_line/

[mahgnib]

Scottish poet William Dunbar (1460-1520}; language modernized somewhat by Michael Burch

[pasdetrois]

David Kinloch, Greengown

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"Batman's aff his nut / Have you seen the way he cuts aboot / Dressed up as a mad fuckin bat / Batterin guys..."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[edlboetie]

"To a Mouse" by Robert Burns

[forestempty]

I've lost count of how many times you've apologised. You cradle my head and tell me you're sorry again and it doesn't mean a thing. I look at you and feel completely empty.

We stand in the cold and inch away from one another. If I am to change then perhaps I am also to grow away from you. It confuses me that I can feel so alone when I am loved so much.

A new season begins. A crow eats the seeds I left for her on the windowsill. She turns to speak to me but I don’t understand. I ask her name and she only stares.

[ahpoems]

In your absence.

I  want you to scoop out my brain and climb into my mind. To see how empty the world is through heartbroken eyes.

A.H.

[kmbgpoetry]

| burst bubbles | KMBG |

10 August 2024

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[ammonitetestpatterns]

william dunbar

[xariesfairyx]

[moodymeangirl]

“come gather round assholes and chop me a line i'll tell you a tale of a good friend of mine  ... there's a chain that is snaking all through our dreams it wraps round our eyes and shuts out moonbeams and my young heart was twisted by dark sexual games and the terminal shadow of heartache and stain ... now i live among lost men with winding down lives i sleep on their sofas and feel up their wives i wake late in the morning with a scream in my skull i shuffle to the kitchen but the knives are all dull” (Night Lillies by Jackie Leven)

[victusinveritas]

Poem by Colin McIntyre (1927–2012)

Published in From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945 (ASL, 2014)