Oh indeed, I have my haggis at the ready. I have my neeps and tatties and my whiskey cake or shortbread and raspberries (yet to be decided). I have a couple, well a few, okay I have a lot of fine malts tae sample including a very nice Speyside sent at Christmas by Jim and Kathleen, Glen Morangie a Crabbies and Bushmills 10 yr Malt.
Burns was my mother's favourite poet and she had a bust of him in the china cabinet. The lowland Scots dialect wasnae a great stretch in Ballymena! We were really more Scots than Irish -- Dalriadans, as I always like to say. We were the folk of the Stone of Scone, the people of the olden kingdoms of the north when the seas were connections, not barriers to trade. When the sea was the easy way to travel.
So I regard Burn's Night as my tradition too, though I never had haggis as a child but this was because my mother could not stand even the smell of lamb! She'd have frowned a bit on the whiskey too even if we could have afforded whiskey. But I love lamb and I like a wee dram and almost despite her encouragement, I still write poems. So I'll address the haggis and enjoy the tasting and here's the story:
Quare advise tae a buddin' poet
Betimes
as a wean I’d help Mammy tae dust.
The Bust, eight inches high
aye sat in the corner o' the cabinet
but I wasn’t allowed tae
touch it.
He was that young an’ fair and looked tae be
made o' honeycomb
so I asked, Mammy, Is that yella man?
Naw
yella man’s fer eaten.
Thon’s Rabbie Burns, mammy
explained, the greatest Scottish poet ever lived.
My luv is like
a red, red rose, A Man’s a man fer a’ that, Ye Banks and
Braes,
To a mouse and Auld Lang Syne’s a wheen o’ what he
wrote.
We’d learned Ye Banks and Braes in school. I was
impressed.
I want to be a poet, I confessed, when I grow
up.
Aye, yer arse in parsley! she aimed a bussock at my
behind,
You’ll ha'tae up yer ideas a bit, she
said.
Poetry’s not a payin’ job and anyway, Mammy lot a
hoogh gie fit tae burst,
remember that ye ha'tae grow up
first!
First Published in A New Ulster Apr 2018
This was published at the same time and seems more relevant than ever in these day when Ulster's status is in great doubt.
Belonging
I
have the voice of no country. I don’t
know that my native land
was ever real;
a place of fractures, born of volcanoes,
rifts
in its rocks that never truly heal.
Even the old kingdom was
united
more by a turbulence of sea than land.
But the
blood, the blood was real between us,
these days depicted (Pict)
by the red hand.
We were the Dal Riata. We were Scots.
Feth
aye, we were! Fought over and fought back,
triumphed in defeat
because Iona
was our own and the Stone of Destiny
belonged
to us and spread our culture far.
And yes, that blood was thick
and bloody real
between us, Aethelfrith, and the Ui Neills.
Yet
we were not planted as in new soil,
but flowed here on the tides
of history,
left and returned through many centuries.
Who
will inflict a future on us next?
In global politics we have no
friends.
But though I have no country and no voice,
I'll
remain Dalriadan to the end.
