In The Poetry

People often ask me where I’m from, even in my own country – I seem to have a whole collection of strange anecdotes of people doing that. I’m going to sit down in a pub on a chair in London and this woman went “You cannae sit in that chair. It’s my chair.” And me [...]

Her

I had been told about her.
How she would always, always.
How she would never, never.
I’d watched and listened
but I still fell for her,
how she always, always.
How she never, never.

In the small brave night,
her lips, butterfly moments.
I tried to catch her and she laughed
a loud laugh that cracked me in two,
but then I had been told [...]

George Square

My seventy seven year old father
Put his reading glasses on
To help my mother do the buttons
On the back of her dress.
‘What a pair the two of us are!’
my mother said, ‘Me with my sore wrist,
you with your bad eyes, your soft thumbs!’

And off they went, my two parents
To march against the war in Iraq,
Him [...]

Things Fall Apart

My birth father lifted his hands above his head
and put the white mask of God on his handsome face.

A born-again man now, gone were the old tribal ways,
the ancestral village – African chiefs’ nonsense, he says.

I could see his eyes behind the hard alabaster.
A father, no more real, still less real – not [...]

Old Tongue

When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit
stummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
so you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!

My own vowels started to stretch [...]

Brendon Gallacher

He was seven and I was six, my Brendon Gallacher.
He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher.
His father was in prison; he was a cat burglar.
My father was a communist party full-time worker.
He had six brothers and I had one, my Brendon Gallacher.

He would hold my hand and take me by the [...]