i.m. Edwin Morgan (with thanks for all the lines)
West in a warm blaze
To spaced out typestracts,
A feast of reason,
Teeming heads,
A painful dreaming.
This city in waters,
This Mungo’s Well,
Brings tears of dust
And flow of soul.
Handed a thistle I search
Empires and archives,
But conjure instead
Frost and buses,
White new bread,
Back court trash
And verdant herbage,
Sheets of whisky,
Violet thunder.
Winding down like a song
My map of skin
Sweats to speak
A spring of words.
It’s blue dark night
And a peculiar platinum
Lets galaxies usher
A night of panthers,
From Glasgow to Saturn.
Lines borrowed from Edwin Morgan poems (with kind permission of the Edwin Morgan Literary Estate) including: Head, dsh:recollection of a vortex, A chapter, A City, A Night Sweat, A Sunset, The Flowers of Scotland, In Glasgow, Glasgow Sonnet’s i, iv and ix, The Poet, Carboniferous, Colloquy in Glaschu, Making a Poem, Hunger, Spell, Epilogue – Seven Decades.
© Mary Paulson-Ellis
First published in Clockworks Vol. 1