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Dream Cities

Gerrie Fellows

I

Glasgow, late September and the city I spoke of
in another country (its fierce sandstone
burning, its bombast of finials built on the heads of slaves
the monumental tower blocks of a later order
catching fire from the west as a plane comes in)
has become in two months
a dream a nostalgia

For it is litter not grandeur
a muddied disturbance in a dirty river
a sullen reflection sliced by concrete
(the monumental pillars
and glorious boulevards of a later order)

Against the vivifying light
of the south the suburban avenues
of a world of space it is rain
rain and old world pallor

and beyond it
on the high points of Aonach Mor and Ben Nevis
(so early a door closing and opening)
the first snows of the winter

II

Early November and the city I parted from
in two months has become a dream technicolour
not quite Auckland or Christchurch
but a dream place of skyscrapers and heady blossom
stern waxy magnolia silk of almond and crab apple
A dream place but Christchurch as it was then
in mid-September Jane driving me to the airport
past gardens reeking with nectar

for there Spring has continued without me

And here I wake no longer at home


Gerrie Fellows

from The Body in Space (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

Best Scottish Poems 2014 Glasgow Homesickness memory

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2014. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2014 was Roderick Watson.

Author's note:

‘Dream Cities’ is a poem about the way places change in our imagination and memory, and in dream. It was written in the aftermath of a visit home to New Zealand when I had lived long enough in Scotland to have put down roots; and it was written in two distinct parts, symbolic perhaps of the split all of us must feel who belong to two countries.

It is a poem of shifting viewpoints, lit by southern hemisphere light and by Glasgow's red sandstone; and shadowed both by the Antipodean sense of Europe as the old world, the dark of history, and by the literal dark of the coming Scottish winter.

It is also a poem whose meanings have changed since the time of its writing. The earthquakes which hit Christchurch tore apart the city I remember. The poem’s paradisal dream place no longer exists.

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Best Scottish Poems 2014

edited by Roderick Watson
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Gerrie Fellowsb.1954

Gerrie Fellows was born in New Zealand but has lived and worked in Scotland for thirty years, as a creative writing tutor, writer-in-residence and most recently as a mentor to new poets through the Clydebuilt Mentoring programme.
More about Gerrie Fellows

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