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  • Monument
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Monument

Katy Ewing

On YouTube 
an American woman 
describes climbing the 287 steps as: 
a tight, claustrophobic, nasty business
and with remnants still of the acute vertigo 
that ten years ago had me bedbound  
I struggle to watch her selfie-stick video
spiral ascent of the narrow stone staircase.
I almost feel the worn steps under my feet,
the cold stone against my arm, 
and I’m eight or so years old with my dad 
in the days before selfies, 
one of many tourists, waiting, waiting; 
hungry for my turn to see the improbable sweep 
of Edinburgh city tiny from above 
laid out between hills and water,  
and both of us with aching legs of height-fear 
and the climbing, climbing weak legs 
and crowded by the other tourists, 
pressing anoraks and big cameras and loud voices
 
and I’m not really getting enough 
from the famous monument, 
and begin to feel the emptiness after all 
of the beautiful carved figures and faces.
Now, Wikipedia shows me pictures of these
and the names of the many nineteenth century sculptors 
who chiselled their way into this history, 
a couple of them were even women.
And Scott was carved of white Carrara marble 
and sits with his quill pen, and his dog Maida, looking out.
But I can’t see him without the image of his infant self, 
disabled, but undeterred, enticed to crawl swathed 
in curative freshly flayed Smailholm sheepskin and bathed 
in the fae and bloody tales and ballads of the borderlands, 
and the voices and lives of the folk who made him.

Katy Ewing

Tags:

Walter Scott 250

About this poem

Katy Ewing says, ‘I was reading Scott’s Ashestiel memoir and at the same time I attended an excellent writing workshop about how we as writers with physical limitations or illnesses can access nature and I became interested in this monumental man’s childhood memories of life-changing illness and the intersections between physicality, experience and imagination and the poem flowed from that – of course, there are also layers about tourism!’

 

Tom Murray says. ‘Katy is a poet who digs deep and trusts her poetic instincts. A memory of climbing Scott monument as a child. ‘the emptiness after all of the beautiful carved figures and faces.’ Where was the man Scott in all that carved stone?  A poem that goes in poetic search of the Scott, and finds him, not as the grown man, a writer, the almost mythical figure but Scott as a boy in Smailholm in his own creative landscape.

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Katy Ewing

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