What’s Human

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2013. 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 2013 was David Robinson.

Editor’s comment:

The contrast between the unknown depth between the stars and our own infinitely more transient lives is a common enough theme of poetry, but that doesn’t make it any the less remarkable – particularly when delivered with such concision, calling up comparison between those vast interstellar darknesses and uncharted depths within ourselves.

Author’s note:

‘What’s Human’ was written on my smallholding in Dumfriesshire during the bitterly cold winter of 2010-2011.  I was just beginning work on a large group of poems about the Galloway Forest – its dark skies, ruined farms and disappearing population – that later became a pamphlet, The Dark Farms (Roncadora Press). But on that night, I went outside to shut in the hens, then was tempted by the brilliance of the stars to walk across the frozen fields, feeling very cold, looking up into the sky.  This poem arrived, almost intact from the start.  It’s a poem that still takes me back to exactly that moment, that place, that bone-penetrating cold.  Afterwards, what took me longest was to choose the title.