Moniaive Saturday 3rd March

Poetry! Pies! More Pies!

Robert Burns

Laid off about this before. Down with the sentimentalisation and trivialisation of one of our greatest radical writers. Down with the once a year Scotsmen who snigger about his drinking and womanising,who

"explode like this once a year.
The rest of the time
these man are sober

rotarians. Unionists. And that apart,
wouldn’t know a poem
if it bit them on the arse."

Hurrah for the bravery of the man himself,risking transportation or death to put forward his views of liberty and equality.

I Murder Hate

I murder hate by flood or field,
Tho' glory's name may screen us;
In wars at home I'll spend my blood-
Life-giving wars of Venus.
The deities that I adore
Are social Peace and Plenty;
I'm better pleas'd to make one more,
Than be the death of twenty.

My Ma

The picture doesn't do her justice, don't think, but today would have been my Ma's
91st birthday. The day before Burns'.


My Mother’s Dictionary


The pages curl back from arcane
all the way to chabazite
and a paper black with anagrams,
epsils, sepisle, sleep is, sleep is.
Some words are marked.
Otherness in bold red pen, tutelage.
Near Spring, there’s a parchment of a leaf.
In the margin by violin,
the name O’ Brien,
mysteriously underlined.
Fanning the pages is to breathe her in,
to the point you can imagine her, witchcraft,
by that roaring fire again, smoke curling,
words circling her legs like cats.