Four poems from “Lockerbie, Pan Am Flight 103”

On 21 December 1988, the longest night of the year, Pan Am Flight 103 fell on the small town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers and crew, and 11 Lockerbie residents. It remains the worst terrorist attack on UK soil.

The Wishin’ Gate

Leuk beneath ma gravestane,
through the keekie-hole

when the rowan’s laden,
when the summer’s duin:

a skein o geese abuin me,
the green leaves muildert gold.

Divna come in warm July.
Come at winter’s chill,

loose the boat aside the loch,
see the fire is set,

an touch the silvered lichen
by the wishin’ gate.

Rescue Worker

He can see them
where he found them,
lit by the beam
of the torch on his forehead,
untouched, it seemed,
by the fall.

He hoped
they had slept
but knew they had not:
those two young women
he found in the dark field
that December night

still strapped
to their plane-seats,
their arms
tight around each other,
their fingers crossed.

On a hillside

Human flesh hung on the trees at Tundergarth,
the day the sky rained limbs
and knives and forks
and tight-wrapped salt
and sugar-packs and hand-wipes.
And in the field, at Tundergarth,
the farmer heard the corbies caw.

Ruth saw a hand on her roof
and told the police.
Jessie made 200 scones
for the rescue workers.
Her dog fetched an arm
to the door
and she wrapped it in a cloth.

When the people came
from far away
about the t-shirts and the jerseys,
the notebooks and the backpacks
of the dead sons and daughters

that fell on Ella’s house,
she gave them tea,
and helped them to find
their children’s possessions.

And when the mother travelled,
with pieces of glass and sand
from the surfing beach
her son loved,
Ella helped her build a cairn
on the hill near Tundergarth
and sent her home,
different
from when she came.

After the plane fell, the bodies, and the possessions of the dead lay in the gardens, the streets, and the hills around Lockerbie for many days. The whole area for miles around was a crime scene. Later, the possessions of those who died were simply kept in a shed, until a group of women in the town worked to return them to their loved ones.  

Toothpaste

It was the toothpaste that nearly defeated them.
It was there in each suitcase: each tube had exploded
over every shirt and blouse they tried to mend,

but one washed, one ironed and one folded,
until each trace of the blast,
of blood and of fuel was removed,
and at last, after seven years of waiting
the clothes of each son, of each daughter,
were returned to each mother, to each father,

and the unread pages of a journal
of a girl who lived to twenty
were unfolded, leaf by leaf,
ironed one by one,
her words returned
clean and washed in their pages.

Haud tae Me

(Ella Ramsden’s Poem)

See the wey the sunlicht faas
abuin the green floo’er oan the hill,
see the sun ye canna reach
oan that bit gorse aside the loch.

Haud ma haun an we will climb
up tae the licht there yonner.
See the wey, it’s further yet,
further as we gan.

See the wey it lichts thon bit,
the bit ye think ye’ll niver reach,

whaur iviry beuch o iviry tree’s
in bloass’m fae the sun.
We will gan thigither there,
afore the summer’s done.