Scots poem of the month - June 2009

This piece of writing was selected by the staff at the Scottish Poetry Library who receive Foundation funding from the Scottish Arts Council

Mither Tonuge I: Arncroach Vortex Sutra It’s craw time again on oor hill: white skies an telegraph poles an smashed ice studdin the road frae Higham tae Lochty, an nothing much o licht that isna partly imagined: pools o it oot by the feed troch, pinpricks o gowd in the scatter o whins an stane at the edge o the yaird whaur aw we ever kent begins again: snawflauchts, then sleet, then lown, like a verse frae Sunday school, the meanin suddenly clear, efter aw this time o hearin it like a dream at the back o ma mind, an thinking o other things that didna matter.   II: The Deid Bytimes A see them, oot on summer nichts, haikin through fields o rye whaur the laund meets the watter; or bone-white under a chuffie moon, crowlin the back roads, glintin in at starnie windaes: thirty years deid an still no ready tae leave, cawin oot, ghaist tae ghaist, in the tawted dark, wauchet wi dew or smuirt wi the scent o hemlock; though, these days, A canna mind the language they use, or the music that slips between, in the dark pauses, for A’m gane awa: a long time gone an the road back is far and haw like a mither’s grief.   III: Ariel Efter a time A missed the taste o resin an how the wind wid seek me in the pines gustin frae cleft tae cleft an finding nae answer. There are some that wad caw it luck, tae be alone and hidden; there are some that wad caw it grace, an A raked for the smell o whin in the milk and stour o the scullery flair, a broken dyke ma bield, or a wifie’s ban, blawn in the barley or dimmed in a slair o aisles, A was too far oot in the open, an too well-seen, always afeart he wad trap me an cairy me in: to set for keeps in ane o his windless books, a body for drownin: words an naething but.   IV: English Speaking Board Later, we would find it in that narrow alcove by the cloakrooms, smaller than we expected, and not quite dry, though it must have lain there for years, amidst the brooms and Christmas decorations. One of the older children dragged it out and we stood for a while in silence, surprised by its sheer drabness, and the trail of grease and chalk it left behind, old spider webs and flies and just a hint of beeswax in the line of stitching where the forehead must have been. The eyes were gone, the mouth just a tear; yet, underneath, the pupa of a voice lay fat and soft, the green fuse in the flower, cocooned in dust and spit, and fresh as rain.   V: Abroad Got here the nicht, efter years o wnaderin, comin in oot the rain and the subplots o transit: tobacco, then glass, then the wifie ahint the counter cawin upstairs in a language that wisna spoken till now; then the wifie prepared me a bed, as if for a corpse, an A lay doon in milkweed an siller like somebody’s son. For years, it’s been like this was what A loved the maist: the balm o sleep, the bairnheid o dreamin, but aw that really matters here is wakin, the body returned to the world like a map, or a windfa, the pit o the throat rehearsed in the mither tongue. by John Burnside From New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009) Poem supplied courtesy of Birlinn

About the poet John Burnside teaches English at the University of St Andrews.  His new poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, is published by Jonathan Cape in August. Photo by Lucas Burnside

Inspiration for the Poem I don't usually write in Scots, but when Robert Crawford asked if I would write a poem for his Burns commemorative anthology, New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, I said I would. Though not altogether mandatory, I felt it was important that I write in my mither tongue; to begin with, however, I was afraid Scots might not come naturally to me, given my personal history. I was raised in Cowdenbeath, and for ten years spoke what was then (sometimes) referred to as 'Kirkcaldy dialect', but at the age of 11 I was taken to England where, as part of a general project of supposed social improvement, I attended something called The English Speaking Board - presumably in order to reprogramme my uncouth tongue. As it happened, I remained doggedly uncouth, but the Board did manage to cloud my sense of Scots till, gradually, it became the creature of a dark and unusually rainy past, a remote, slightly shambling thing that seemed determined to keep to the inky shadows of my Fife-bred subconscious.  It was, therefore, a matter of some pleasure when this poem came - a poem that, among other things, is about losing contact with a culture and a history, and then, in a shy and tentative way, venturing on the first steps of a spiritual homecoming.