January -- Burn's Night an a' that!

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.