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  • For Alasdair
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For Alasdair

Douglas Young

Standan here on a fogg-yirdit stane,
drappan the bricht flees on the broun spate,
I’m thinkan o ye, liggan thonder your lane,
i the het Libyan sand, cauld and quate.
The spate rins drumlie and broun,
whummlan aathing doun.

The fowk about Inverness and Auld Aberdeen
aye likeit ye weel, for a wyce and a bonny man.
Ye were gleg at the Greekan o’t, and unco keen
at gowf and the lave. Nou deid i the Libyan sand.
The spate rins drumlie and broun,
whummlan aathing doun.

Hauldan the Germans awa frae the Suez Canal,
ye dee’d. Suld this be Scotland’s pride, or shame?
Siccar it is, your gallant kindly saul
maun lea thon land and tak the laigh road hame.
The spate rins drumlie and broun,
whummlan aathing doun.


Douglas Young

from Naething Dauntit: the collected poems of Douglas Young , ed. Emma Dymock (Humming Earth, 2016)

Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Douglas Young.

Tags:

elegies Libya remembrance Scots Scots World War II

About this poem

This poem was composed while Young was fishing on the banks of the Calder at Lochwinnoch in 1941, in memory of a Highland student at Aberdeen, killed during the German advance into Libya.

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Douglas Young1913 - 1973

Douglas Young, poet and essayist, was a colourful figure of the Scottish Renaissance, a member of the young Scottish National Party, and was imprisoned for refusing conscription in 1942. He had an international reputation as a scholar of Greek.
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