The Poetry Reaper
sitting in The Scotia
after John McGarrigle who-
was-killed-in-The Clutha’s funeral,
wolfing
triangular tuna sandwiches
and listening to someone singing
We Shall Overcome
into a feedback microphone, I ask
Bobby Christie
if he remembers walking home
twenty-five years ago
from Tom Leonard’s Writers’ Group
in Paisley in the dark
with
towering orange streetlamps
and turning left into Penilee Road
where a cop in a panda
wound down his window and asked us
what we had in our bags
to which we shouted POETRY!
in unison,
lifted
thick majestic photocopies
and POEMS OF THIRTY YEARS
by Edwin Morgan into the air
as he looked on in horror
and told us to be on our way
and not to do it again
and Bobby
disappeared over the hill
as I turned right into Atholl Crescent
to go to a house where I no longer live
to talk to people who
are no longer there,
and Jim Ferguson
is wearing a burning red tie
and brandishing a virtual cigarette, and
We Shall Overcome was sung
by Joan Baez in 1963, it’s really
hard to believe, it feels
as if yesterday
has still to happen, tomorrow
is already gone
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:
I’d just been to the funeral for John McGarrigle, the Glasgow poet who was killed in The Clutha. The wake was held in the Scotia Bar, and we were all sitting there talking quietly and eating sandwiches and it was beautifully surreal. Ordinary fragile life going on in the midst of unbearable pain. That was the starting spark for the poem, and I then added elements exploring the idea of life hurtling past leaving us all behind, poets and non-poets alike. The famous and the forgotten. Time racing away. I put in the completely true humorous central section with the policeman to build it to a sort of false climax, before moving towards the more reflective complete ending with someone looking back on his life and the people he knew who are now long gone. There’s a very thin line between comedy and tragedy.
