Literary Orphans

Saints, Sea, Hills, Drink and Fitba by Morgan Downie

john-mcsporran-the-golden-road

Saint Andrew

elbow deep in fish heads,

hands scaled with his toil,

his glazed eyes upward

a vision spoken in tongues

garbled from late night shebeens,

assignations with the nameless

fruit of hidden stills.

 

on his arms the faded

blue of the saltire,

the death to come,

a thistle in outline,

hard edged, bristling

with thorns.

 

O Typekey Divider

 

The Sail-Loft

landed sail,

the copper red

of sunset,

 

an unsteady passage,

irregular as the pages

of burnt books,

 

sea-nets, ash tongued

and windless, spread

in the rafters,

 

canvas draped like shed

skin, a moult of

moth wings.

 

the roof creaks in the sun.

the dust holds

its breath.

 

and faint, faint,

the resting sail

tells of the voyage.

 

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Bivouac on a Scottish Hillside

there is no army here,

no campfires and no camp followers.

and that glen below

is shelled with empty walls,

broken shielings,

denuded even of sheep.

 

here, beneath the treeless scarp

is the peat-rut cry of deer,

the endless shivering of grass,

a great silence, reaching up

and up to a cloudless sky.

here, the ecstatic being is…

 

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Uisge Beatha

they called it god’s breath

the seventh day elixir,

milk of amber burns,

spill of yellow grain,

the long weeping

of hills in autumn.

these were deities once,

crumbled and nameless,

hearth gods, who swallowed

the sun against the winter dark.

 

we wash our throats

gladly with their echo,

emerge tear-streaked,

like transfigured saints,

the ingrained grime

of our deeds hidden

in the desperate clasp

of hands, all the while

the glaze of our eyes,

shining, shining

bright as icons

 

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Jags

Partick Thistle, club of artists, terraces

crowded with creatives, battling the police

in swift arguments over the finer points

of the soccer dialectic. Or filming the game

in grainy super-8, slowing down the action

even further, until the white passage of the ball

is suspended calmly over the green prism

of the pitch, egg-like and serene against

a waving background of claret and amber,

an image to draw gasps from thinking

folk all the way from London to Venice.

 

Team talks have been replaced,

jettisoned in favour of happenings,

where strikers strike poses, strolling

around Foucault like cats, surefooted

but always with an eye for the main chance.

The midfield occupy the centre in brooding

silence, awaiting the arrival of the defenders,

the beat defenders, hard-eyed, wreathed

in smoke and last night’s cheap perfume.

They scorn tactics, go with the flow,

a goal is, after all, just a goal.

 

Partick Thistle, club of artists –

there are those believers, holy fools,

who say when  the long trophy haul

is finally over and all are wreathed

in triumph, that fans and team will join hands,

from those grey bearded terrace Montaignes

to the wild eyed home goal revolutionaries,

twitching with fervour and ayahuasca,

shouting incantation and aphorism alike.

There, in that briefest of moments, Firhill

victorious, will be seen to levitate.

 

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Brockville

Unbowed by their banishment to the away end,

that uncovered crucible of decayed foundry brick,

the opposition support, gobshite presences fresh from

their corroded Fiestas, unfurl their banners and, cans

in hand, perform an ironic lower division mexican wave,

catcall our soft southern drizzle, our slow hand clap.

 

We huddle together, parka’d like yaks in the dreich

afternoon that is December. I will not leave this brief

warmth to brave the toilets, the awful chasm of cracked

cement, frozen rivers of urine cake, nor will I join

the queue of  iron-stomached hardies who dare a pie,

better men than me, who only stands and shivers.

 

Goalie, you’re nothing but a yellow ball of fluff,

one of the terrace stalwarts erupts, a remnant from

days when creativity rather than crudity ruled the chant.

The goalie leans disconsolate against the nearside post,

the canary of his jersey, a maillot jaune of victory

in any other sport, sags under a slurry of rain.

 

The ball idles in midfield, that bone on bone

zone of the late tackle, rolls slovenly across

the centre circle mud, before an agricultural

punt forward, the baited breath hail mary

of the long pass, connecting with the our striker’s

head like a butcher slapping a side of meat.

 

The ball is an arc and the goalie an instant between

stillness and movement, a blur that could be Boccioni,

gloved hand palming over the bar then, looking upward

to his terrace tormentor, grins to desultory applause.

Aye, good save son. And we too clap our mittened

hands, playing our part, the game rather than the man.

O Typekey Divider

Morgan Downie is a poet, short story writer and visual artist. His published work includes stone and sea, a collection of poems about island life mainly centred on the Western Isles, and distances, a Romanian- English photopoetry collection. He lives on the Scottish mainland even if he’d rather be on an island.

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O Typekey Divider

–Art by John McSporran

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