Glasgow Rose

Work on 'Bandits!' will, I hope, continue but the central image for this came to me just now and I needed to get it out of my head. It's another Glasgow poem. Possibly I should put a day in the diary for the writing of an Edinburgh poem, before I lose my ability to say 'dearrrrrrr' and forget that sex is what potatoes come in.

Glasgow Rose

Glasgow bears its backside along the old canal -
Rough and red, and bruised with open windows -
And fills it with its slurry and its waste.
Drunkards with heavy eyes go stumbling past,
Or stand and stare down urine-coloured swans.
Crushed cans lie in the beds of yellow reeds:
'Coca-cola', they lament,
And 'Tesco' say the flapping shopping bags;
And silently they argue with graffiti on the walls.

The mural seems like more graffiti, at first glance,
On its brick wall among the gutted warehouses,
The factories forever shut, their windows ever-open.
In the mural the canal is blue,
The factories are busy with black smoke;
But there are red flecks where the paint is chipped,
And I can hardly read the legend:
'Our Canal. Our Future.'

On a wet Spring evening,
Looking across the Forth-and-Clyde canal
I see a vision eloquent, complete,
Too perfect to change,
Too perfect to communicate.

Like the little white rose of Scotland.
And like that rose, too perfect yet to last.


For another poem, strike out the last line and write 'Too perfect to last' under 'Too perfect to change'. But that poem, that bit of no-good moony Romantic fatalism, could hardly be less like the call for change and struggle of my hard-edged Marxist pentameter. That other poem was written by a self-indulgent Edinburgh bourgeois, who I happen to know very well.

I suppose it's a Forth-and-Clyde poem by a person who has had a Forth-and-Clyde life, such of it as has transpired so far.

(PS: It has been observed by another Marxist poet that 'First comes grub and then the moral' and I know that I have of late been less regular in documenting my grub. But it's exam season so I am living on the same dish of Cauliflower Watsit for three nights in a row; probably silence is the best policy.)