Sunday 30 August 2015

The Sunday Posts 2015/ This Bitter Earth



This bitter earth
What fruit it bears
What good is love

That no one shares?
And if my life is like the dust
That hides the glow of a rose
What good am I?
Heaven only knows

This bitter earth
Can it be so cold?
Today you're young
Too soon your old
But while a voice
Within me cries
I'm sure someone
May answer my call
And this bitter earth
May not be so bitter after all


Deborah Cox
Photo by Alistair.

Sunday 16 August 2015

The Sunday Posts 2015/The Right Honourable Eyelash’s Summer Panic




For readers outside the UK, Andy Burnham is a candidate for the leadership of the British Labour Party. He has a video on Youtube touting his credentials as Mr. Everyman. It is said he is entirely made of plastic, a sort of man for all reasons. There's more info in this article in the Guardian.

Here is Irish poet Kevin Higgins' contribution to the Burnham saga.


This is not the gas
I’d hoped to be passing here today.
I wish I was able to tell you
a government of me

would starve useless
eaters of bacon butties
and deep fried Cadbury’s Cream Eggs
in Dundee and Sunderland
just a little more slowly than this government
is so brutally doing at present;

that under me
every old age pensioner,
like the old lady across the road
who died last year of the winter, will receive
their own personal nuclear submarine.

Sadly, recent polls
have rendered such dreams
politically impossible.
As things stand, for half a vote
I’d happily come around and polish
your baby’s bottom;
play hide and seek
with your pet hippopotamus;
tell you no student should have to pay
for university by going on the game
more than five nights a week;
mow your lawn;
nationalise the railways; or cure 
your husband’s baldness.

Between now and elect-me-day
if you need someone to plant
slobbery kisses on your elderly uncle’s
surprise third buttock,

anything you want, I am it.

Sunday 9 August 2015

The Sunday Posts 2015/ oor Wullie



Fair fa' your rosy-cheekit face,
Your muckle buits, wi' broken lace,
Although you're always in disgrace,
An' get your spanks,
In all our hearts ye have your place,
Despite your pranks.  Your towsy held, your dungarees,
Your wee snub nose, your dirty knees,
Your knack o' seeming tae displease
Your Ma an' Pa.
We dinna care a tuppenny sneeze
We think you're braw.  You're wee, an' nae twa ways aboot it,
You're wise, wi' very few tae doot it,
You're wild, there's nane that wad dispute it,
Around the toon. But maist o a' ye are reputit
A lauchin' loon.  Weel-kent, weel-liked, you're aye the same,
Tae Scots abroad and Scots at hame.
North, south, east, west, your weel-won fame
Shall never sully.
We'll aye salute that couthie name:
Oor Wullie.

Unknown.

muckle=large
towsy=untidy
braw=fine
lauchin' loon=laughing boy
weel-kent=well known
aye=always
couthie=friendly

Sunday 2 August 2015

The Sunday Posts 2015/Linguist



If we lived in a world where bells
truly say 'ding-dong' and where 'moo'
is a rather neat thing
said by a cow,
I could believe you could believe
that these sounds I make in the air
and these shapes with which I blacken white paper
have some reference
to the thoughts in my mind
and the the feelings in the thoughts.

As things are
if I were to gaze in your eyes and say
'bow-wow' or 'quack' you must take that to be
a dispairing anthology of praises'
a concentration of the opposites
of reticence, a capsule
of my meaning of meaning
that I can no more write down
than I could spell the sound of the sigh
I would then utter, before
dingdonging and mooing my way
through all the lexicons and languages
of imprecision.

 Norman MacCaig, October 1964.
Photo by Alistair
 

The Sunday Posts 2017/Mince and Tatties.

Mince and Tatties I dinna like hail tatties Pit on my plate o mince For when I tak my denner I eat them baith at yince. Sae mash ...