At 9:15 this morning
you hurt your brother and lied about it.
It was an accident!
He did it himself!
Every variation casting up a veil between us.

The victim, too young to lie,
brokenly identifies his tormentor
and I am speechless at the act
and the denial

But I remember.
I remember the impulse too well -
preserve yourself!
No-one saw, they can't be sure you did it.
The theatrical collapse into self pitying insistence.
I remember how easily
I could convince myself of my innocence
and the hopelessness of others' incredulity.
Ah, ugly times.

So I understand, but it still hurts.
Not because I can't trust you now.
Not because it seems like a moment ago
that you, like your victim,
had no inclination to deceive.
Not even because you must take me for a fool
to try it.

It hurts
because in the midst of the forest of wishes I have for you
one wish quietly crumbles:
the wish
that you
will be better than me.

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.