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Echoes (Killhope)

Deflated hills slope gently
under a low, leaden sky.
Galena grey is the Pennine landscape,
the wind a chisel.
Smooth steel on wheels, we glide
down the valley, park neatly, picnic.
Park Level ploughs into the ground
straight as a gutter. Clumsy rubber
safety boots splash and plod as we are
guided down;

the hewer’s booted foot is sure,
his clarty cap hides a wary eye.
Blasting the grey vein,
sweating the cold sweat,
drinking the cold tea,
in paraffin glow. His lamp burns low –
still, the pitman heeds no caution
whar a candel will not burn;
but howk the grey ore out
and then collect your pay.

Down tunnels darker still,
the Coffin Level’s murk dispelled
by tallow’s splutter;
the miner of a darker time
squirms all day in this stone cocoon,
his chisel worming at a single groove,
corkscrewed in so deeply that
claustrophobia, lurking in the shadows, amplifies
stale water’s short dread drip.

The bright light sanctifies
ten rocky feet or so
of tunnel; coaxed
from the dark’s stifling grasp,
we make for the sun’s embrace,
clambering out and hurrying
from the chattering echoes.
Yet they are there,
with the pregnant shadows.

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Peggy

In the first days of the year
they made a fleeting first-foot visit.

They’d not stop long.

Alec stood at the gate
while Peg stayed in the car;
that’s my memory of her,
seeming stuck in the passenger seat,
baggy, immobile by then.
I was maybe eight, and in my head,
a logical connection formed
with mum’s bulky old peg-bag,
shirt-shaped to hang on the line,
a down-to-earth yet strangely
awe-inspiring sight.

Decades since she’d worked a loom
– in Dundee, a ‘limb’,
like an extension of the body;
one woman might work three or four,
dancing shifting bobbins
among the din and the dust.

She was adamant:
‘They say weavers shout,
but we dinnae shout;
we can aw lipread!’
– then she’d break off and bawl
from her fourth floor window
to the bairns in the court below.

And the wailing o’ the bummer and the clacking o’ the looms
brought the women o’ Dundee oot o’ their beds;

dancing down through time
with their past pride intact
they seem as strong as hessian,
with the same coarse beauty
and ultimate exoticism.

That’s my memory of Peg:
frozen in space and time
as if ready for the off –
a sack-full of the past, to be glimpsed
then whisked away.

They’d not stop long.

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I'm being followed                             Dorothy Lawrenson

I’ve got something to tell you
I’ve got something to tell you
I’m being followed
I’m being followed

I’m being followed by Alexander McCall Smith

He followed me here and he’ll follow me home
(Or would, if I lived in the New Town)
He’ll be lurking in Dundas Street, waiting
With a philosophical digression at the ready
He’ll write me, thinly disguised, into tomorrow’s Scotsman
(He’s got most of my friends already)
He won’t let me rest, he’s completely obsessed,
He’s turning me into an Edinburgh type!

I’m being followed by Alexander McCall Smith

And it doesn’t stop there
Inspector Rebus moved in next door
I moved house – but that Rankin’s too clever
He transferred his detective to Gayfield Square
So I’m still on his beat
There’s no escape
There’s no escape when you’re being followed by a fictional policeman

So you won’t catch me in the Cumberland these days
I don’t go near the Oxford Bar
Leith is out of bounds
(I don’t like the way Irvine Welsh has been looking at me)
In fact you won’t catch me out much at all
       I don’t go out much any more
                 I mostly just stay in and read…