Someone has defaced my library book.
Gone to the trouble of reading, pencil in hand,
ready should the opportunity arise again.
The graffiti is hilariously specific:
at every mention the author makes of England,
my fellow reader has added angry punctuation -
question marks, exclamation marks or,
at moments of presumed frustration,
simply scored the word through.
The book is by Kurt Vonnegut,
an American humanist
who would doubtless have sought to avoid such deep offense
but who would have had no earthly reason for imagining
that a Scot somewhere, years after his death,
would ignore the story,
the tragedy, the humour and the beauty in the prose
so fired up was he by his conviction
that Kurt should have written 'Britain' instead of 'England'.

You see,
proud Scots are often peeved
when the rest of the world pays as little attention to them
as they pay to the rest of the world.
So it goes.

Okay, we're all thinking it -
"Is that all the summer we're going to get?"
Here's the rain again,
wearily familiar.
But hey,
at least some things are constant.

Cauld-bluided, humphing ower the stark grey hills
Gowd een skinkle to an fro
Split tongue lappin at the wind-blown smells
Bog grass blackens whaur ye go
Smoke split shielings and the clammerin o bairns
Bone cracked mithers in yer wake
Heirt-scaud ruin fae the valleys tae the cairns
Driven by a drouth ye canny slake
Crib tale shapit unner creakin heather thatch
Howf born craitur o the nicht
Auld sangs spake aboot the maidens ye would ******
Fleggit bairns tae keep intil the licht
True? Naw, havers, juist the blaflum o wives
God nivver biggit ocht sae fell
But ae bairn crouchin in the ruins o its life
Can think o naethin else the tale tae tell
Blin, lost, forwandert fae the shattered faimly hame
Warslin wi fear tae unnerstan
White winds whistle as he gies the beast a name
And dragons whiles can take the form o man.

At the black bottom of the loch
layers of forgotten days,
long dead, long lost
stir

Though the surface is glass
ruffled by no wind
tideless, seeming safe,
wait -

At any moment
the rot of what was thought
safely buried, hidden,
may rise

And the deeper it was drowned
the bigger bursts its ghost
smashing the reflected sky
forever

My back is to the loch
I walk untroubled hills but wish
that I could turn, raise hands, shout
"Stop!"

And help you.
Only help you.
I wish
that I could help you.

I was dragged
out of trees, off ropeswings
away from friends
every single Sunday of my youth.
The big grey church
filled with frumpy hatted snobs
lit through windows covered
in incomprehensible verse
held neither wonder, peace nor fascination.
Long, agonising sits,
trying not to giggle with my brothers
and praying only for the ordeal to end
did little to fill me with reverence.

But there was a place.
There was a building in whose hallowed hush
I felt the truth of awe,
a place where universes were revealed,
imagination ignited,
questions answered clearly
and not with twenty tons of sludgy obfuscation.
The library.
I loved it even before I could read,
and afterwards, well -
it still seems incredible
that such a place could exist.

Time passes.
And the fact that the powdered old cows
can still fill the church each Sunday,
fill the collection plates,
sing their ****** songs and go,
while rows of empty shelves
gather dust in the ghost of the library
simply
makes me
want
to weep.