The New Year poem

I don't celebrate Hogmanay - never mind why. I prefer to go somewhere with Jane for a walk in surroundings new to us or familiar, with a piece-box of salmon sandwiches (pink salmon, of course) and a flask of black coffee. It's been our thing for so many years that I've forgotten when it started.

This poem was written in the mid-1990s and published in 1999 in the poem-card Roundabout Livingston. The poem-cards were collected and put out as a Kindle e-book as Recycled Cards (available from Amazon).

The Ne'erday blaws

With no time for boozy sentimentality
we picnic by the sea each year.
Seeing existence as continuous
we have now no need of bells, besides,
there are, in each of us,
too many bitter thoughts
and sad reflections at this time.

Better to be blown by the first gusts of January,
seeing a brown and silty sea,
mounded by the gales,
appearing higher than the roadway.
We walk through an empty Culross,
discoverers of a new history.
We smile at each other
as rain slaps our faces,
crazy in alone being here
and delighting in being alone
but for the sermon-ready rooks
hopping solemnly in the shelter of the abbey ruins.

At North Berwick, past the socket
of an old eruption - green ash and purple blocks -
we turn a corner and hear the clicks
of crossbills feeding in the stunted pines;
on the sands a vortex of waders dodges each wave.

In Crail harbour
a seagull becomes part of the reflection,
paddling through windows, walls and lobster-pots.
It pauses before a mountain of floating snow
pretending to be a cloud -
the alchemy of winter skies.
In the sunset we drive home,
the light dimming quickly
as we cross the bridge.
The flicking cables make
a silent film of our flight
arching over a glittering Forth.


We walk through our local streets
seeing "For Sale" signs like corpse-markers
on a medieval battlefield.
The season calls for the placement of tokens
in graveyards - a colourful splash,
for Scotland's towns are mostly drab,
dull dwelling-places merely.
It reminds me of Black Forest window-boxes -
all those salvias defying the grim green spruce.
In our first winter in Mid Calder,
walking through the foggy woods
I heard, unseen, the calls of whooper swans,
an eerie sound at the time,
but no more significant than
"Here's tae us, wha's like us?"

"See yis a' next year?"
And I don't think.

We'll be looking out to some sea,
planning the fierce joys of sudden summers,
the new sights and novelties
reflected in each other,
for what we do best
we do best together.

At our ease we've grown,
and growth, if anything,
is what is meant by
what we are.

Copyright © Colin Will, 1999, 2015