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Best Famous Us Of A Poems

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Scotland 1941

 We were a tribe, a family, a people.

Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field,
And all may read the folio of our fable,
Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield.

A simple sky roofed in that rustic day,
The busy corn-fields and the haunted holms,
The green road winding up the ferny brae.

But Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms
And bundled all the harvesters away,
Hoodicrow Peden in the blighted corn
Hacked with his rusty beak the starving haulms.

Out of that desolation we were born.


Courage beyond the point and obdurate pride
Made us a nation, robbed us of a nation.

Defiance absolute and myriad-eyed
That could not pluck the palm plucked our damnation.

We with such courage and the bitter wit
To fell the ancient oak of loyalty,
And strip the peopled hill and altar bare,
And crush the poet with an iron text,
How could we read our souls and learn to be?
Here a dull drove of faces harsh and vexed,
We watch our cities burning in their pit,
To salve our souls grinding dull lucre out,
We, fanatics of the frustrate and the half,
Who once set Purgatory Hill in doubt.


Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere,
Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation,
And mummied housegods in their musty niches,
Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation,
And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches,
No pride but pride of pelf.
 Long since the young
Fought in great bloody battles to carve out
This towering pulpit of the Golden Calf,
Montrose, Mackail, Argyle, perverse and brave,
Twisted the stream, unhooped the ancestral hill.

Never had Dee or Don or Yarrow or Till
Huddled such thriftless honour in a grave.

Such wasted bravery idle as a song,
Such hard-won ill might prove Time's verdict wrong,
And melt to pity the annalist's iron tongue.

Written by Rg Gregory |

stylised tulips

 stylised tulips – this is what the card says
and they have that nineteen-twenties’ feel
of those bright young things a decade before us
who had a way of walking with their legs
bent back and their pelvis forward as if
inviting a kind of sexual depravity
with the no touch signs fervently displayed

stylised tulips – could be snakes though lurking 
in the undergrowth good for a wriggle or two
tulips however keep their heads held high
disdainfully pretending the whole world
is beneath them - and what colours my dear
(or lack of colour or subtle colours 
whichever the fashion aptly hissed by men)

stylised tulips – hardly the sobriquet
to be pinned on us of a different plumage
(children advancing to and not away from war)
we were the rough-and-ready class (the twerps)
the ignorance is innocence brigade
style was a cheap thing out of woolworths
(we had never heard of the pelvis anyway)

and all our lives our feet on the ground
however much we have let our noses roam
into the shenanigans our part of the world
has happily let itself be wrapped in
at heart we have never been able to accept
the lah-di-dahs of pretending what we’re not
appalled by all the effort it would take to be
stylised tulips