Liz Lochhead

Trouble is not my middle name.
It is not what I am.
I was not born for this.
Trouble is not a place
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be garlanded;
the poet's head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.
...

Down on her hands and knees
at ten at night on Hogmanay,
my mother still giving it elbowgrease
jiffywaxing the vinolay. (This is too
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weather evocative as scent
the romance of dark stormclouds
in big skies over the low wide river
of long shadows and longer shafts of light
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She is getting good and ready to renounce
his sweet flesh.
Not just for lent. (For
Ever)
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I am talking in our lingua franca.
Tell me, do you drive on the left or right?
Is your football team the Botswana Zebras
Or Indomitable Lions of Cameroon?
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‘Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's - from John Donne's
'A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, being the Shortest Day'.

At midday on the year's midnight
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The moment she died, my mother's dance dresses
turned from the colours they really were
to the colours I imagine them to be.
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Friendship is a real boat,
Clydebuilt like the best of them,
pride and strength in every rivet and spot weld.
A vessel to last lifetimes, to carry a bond
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for Robyn Marsack

Go take a book down from the shelf and open it.
Listen, this isn't ‘book' but box,
box full of sound you lift the lid on, opening.
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The river in January is fast and high.
You and I
are off to the Barrows.
Gathering police-horses twitch and fret
at the Tron end of London Road and Gallowgate.
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is peopled with many surfaces.
Ormolu and gilt, slipper satin,
lush velvet couches,
cushions so stiff you can't sink in.
...

Molly Pin Li McLaren,
come home and look
at the pictures in your brand-new book -
a tree, a bird, a fish, a bell,
...

The present author being, from her mother's milk,
a lover of the poetic effusions of Mr Robert Burns and
all creatures therein (whether mouse, louse, yowe, dug
or grey mare Meg) was nonetheless appalled to find,
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"If freedom an whisky gang thegither": Robert Burns

i.
When we sit wined and finely dined,
Dressed up in oor best, braw and fancy,
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There is no need they say
but the needles still move
their rhythms in the working of your hands
as easily
as if your hands
...