A Book of Lives Read online

  Gall from honey is torn by the fingers of such a storm.

  Now Scots men-at-arms mustered by war’s alarms

  Have no magic charms but boldness and brash brawny arms.

  Hey, Saxon standard-bearer, terrify the Scots with that flag!

  Your troops are action-famished there, they won’t linger or lag.

  Archer, stretch your bow and stretch your bow.

  Let arrows fetch devastation from that side to the foe.

  Spearmen, flash lightning from this side. Breathe deep, let go.

  Make it a smash, a crash, let death let them know!

  Slingshot-boy, spread panic with your stones,

  It is no toy, fill ditches with the dead and with dying groans!

  All must stand fast; crossbows are drawn at last;

  The swarm is cast, bolts batter and buzz and blast.

  Spears are at hand, the Saxon satraps look grand,

  But things are at a stand, clear strategy seems banned.

  The Scottish king forms, and informs his potent throng,

  Infantry and cavalry. Oh what an array, so ordered and strong!

  The king’s voice is heard, inspiring the nobility,

  Giving the measured but fiery word to the men of quality.

  He checks and directs the formation of his eager troops.

  Others are worthless, he reckons, and their star droops.

  He incites and delights the multitude of his men.

  He flytes and derides the English – their treaties not worth a hen.

  He said, and he led; all fingers must be firm to the end.

  Never swerve from a serf of the shameless Saxon blend!

  The masses are sassy, they relish the royal rousing.

  They will stand like a band and give the Saxons a sousing!

  Unity is strength, says the king; each knows what each must do.

  Here at length is the war; here, the weapons that are due.

  A jet of arrows will get a bloody groin or two!

  And let a flurry of snake-biting spears bring death to not a few!

  Let each sleek spear leave the leaders without cheer,

  When soon it must appear that death and defeat are near!

  Let the axeman slice limb from trunk with professional flair,

  Let his action be a brandishing of something immovably there!

  A sword-point cannot hide; no one, on no side, sees no readiness.

  Only fate knows those who replace the dead in lucky steadiness

  Wicked hands have invented a trap for trampling horses:

  Ditches with stakes, planted to stop them in their courses.

  The plebs have kindly dug and dug to spatchcock the cavalry

  But those on foot too have the rug pulled out from their revelry,

  Not one of those men will clamber on horseback again.

  Thus lords, though in pain, will be lorded over, complaining in vain.

  The invading army is summoned, the Scottish army is numbered.

  The frontline phalanx is ordered, the king’s bodyguard is sworded.

  The leaders of both sides decide to send out scouts,

  Who come back to divide good counsel with deadly doubts.

  Bloody Sunday opens with the rumbling of omens

  For the Sassenach yeomen, moment by moment.

  The first assaults come whirling on the dry ground of Stirling.

  The English host shines splendid, but soon the glitter is ended.

  Pain is great, pain is piled upon pain.

  Rage is in spate, rage rages as rain.

  Clamour is not blate, a frontline-to-frontline refrain.

  Bravery – checkmate, brave follows brave in vain.

  Ardour cannot wait, ardour is furious and fain.

  Fighters blame fate, fortitude is on the wane.

  Amazement is the state, amazement spreads its stain.

  It is a fuzzy slate, order is slated and slain.

  Uproar cannot abate, Abel loses to Cain.

  Black Monday gives a new life to the deadly plague.

  Scots blow the plague by lucky force upon the English flag.

  The Angles are like angels glittering high and proud,

  But valorous and vassal both are labouring under a cloud.

  English eyes scan the skies for Scots ambushes to arise,

  But Scots are near, are here, full size, surprise surprise!

  The plebs are roaring and swearing, but when things get scary

  They wilt and are weary, they crack under the fury.

  The ogre is mediocre, the Scots are stockier.

  Who will be known as victor? The Dutiful Doctor.

  A reckless raid pretends to be robustly arrayed.

  Deep sobs escalade from the face’s palisade,

  Scots find a route to rush fast forward on foot,

  Brandishing boot on boot, fielding loot for loot.

  What snatching and catching, what bruising and broostling, what grief!

  What warhorns and warnings, what winding and wirrying, no relief!

  What slashing and slaughtering, what wounding and wailing, what a rout!

  What lurking and lunging, what grabbing and groaning, what a turnabout!

  What roaring and rearing, what shrinking and shaking, what lassooing!

  What cloaking and collecting, what snipping and specking, what undoing!

  Bellies will be empty. Both broadswords and bodies are booty.

  So many fatherless children to clutch at futurity!

  Clare of Gloucester, fosterer of courage, earl and landlord,

  Ah, you are out among the dead, by God’s avenging word.

  Lionlike Clifford, you have stiffened at the sword’s point,

  So many blows from the enemy have jarred you at every joint.

  William Marshal, macho, martial in the battle-line,

  Scottish hardmen hacked you down with dastardly design.

  Edmund Mauley, bold and manly royal steward,

  Hosts of hostility have got you scotched and skewered.

  Tiptoft, top fighter, like a blazing fire

  Your grave is blades and staves, and the banners retire.

  Noble Argentan, great gentleman, sweet Giles,

  I would fain have fainted when I saw you in those falling files.

  What is truth worth? How can I sing about so much blood?

  Could even tragedy bare its breast to show such cut and thud?

  The names may be famous but I do not know them all.

  I cannot number the humblings and tumblings of hundreds that fall.

  Many are mown down, many are thrown down,

  Many are drowned, many are found and bound.

  Many are taken in chains for a stated ransom.

  So some are rising, riding rich high and handsome

  Who before the war were poor and threadbare souls.

  The battlefield is barren but piled with spoils.

  Shouts and taunts and vengeful cuts and brawls –

  I saw, but what can I say? A harvest I did not sow!

  Guile is not my style. Justice and peace are what I would show.

  Anyone who has more in store, let him write the score.

  My mind is numb, my voice half-dumb, my art a blur.

  I am a Carmelite, and my surname is Baston.

  I grieve that I survive a happening so harrowing and ghastly.

  If it is my sin to have left out what should be in,

  Let others begin to record it, without rumour or spin.

  James IV To his Treasurer

  Oh for Christ’s sake gie the signor his siller.

  Alchemist my erse, but he’s hermless, is he no?

  He’ll never blaw us up in oor beds, I tak it.

  If makkin wings is his new-fanglt ploy

  It’ll no cost the earth – a wheen o skins,

  Or silk if he can get it, wid for the struts,

  Fedders, is he intae fedders?, gum, oh aye,

  Ane prentice or
twa, keep their mooths shut,

  It micht be kinrik secret stuff, ye ken,

  Fleg the enemy, sky black wi baukie-birds,

  My Gode, whit could ye no drap on thaim –

  This signor, whit’s he cried, Damiano,

  Tell him he’ll get his purse, but tell him:

  Nae mair elixirs, quintessences, faux gowd!

  Ye say he wants tae loup frae the castle-waws

  At Stirling. Weel weel, that’s a dandy step,

  And lat the warld tak tent o sic a ferlie.

  But jist suppose there’s a doonbeat scenario

  For Signor Damiario: ane wing snapt aff,

  He faws, he breks a leg, it’s a richt scunner.

  Signor, help is at haun! Ane speedy litter

  Wheechs him tae Edinburgh, whaur the new College

  O Surgeons welcomes him with aipen erms.

  I’ll be there, signor, a king can set a leg.

  I need mair practice, but I can dae it, oh yes.

  And noo for the warst-case scenario:

  The bird-man whuds doon splat, doon tae his daith.

  Oh what a bonus: we’ll hae ane public dissection.

  My Charter will hae wings, it’ll tak aff,

  Whit can we no dae gif we set oor minds tae it?

  Tell Signor Damiano, be he limpin or be he a corp,

  The College o Surgeons stauns honed and skeely and eident.

  Retrieving & Renewing

  Forget your literature? – forget your soul.

  If you want to see your country hale and whole

  Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.

  Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?

  In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land

  Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand

  Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man

  With soul so dead –? Probably! But a scan

  Would show his fault was ignorance:

  Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance

  Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.

  Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.

  Planet Wave

  The first half of this sequence of poems, commissioned by the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival, and set to music by Tommy Smith, was first performed in the Cheltenham Town Hall on 4 April 1997.

  In the Beginning

  (20 Billion BC)

  Don’t ask me and don’t tell me. I was there.

  It was a bang and it was big. I don’t know

  what went before, I came out with it.

  Think about that if you want my credentials.

  Think about that, me, it, imagine it

  as I recall it now, swinging in my spacetime hammock,

  nibbling a moon or two, watching you.

  What am I? You don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

  I am the witness, I am not in the dock.

  I love matter and I love anti-matter.

  Listen to me, listen to my patter.

  Oh what a day (if it was day) that was!

  It was as if a fist had been holding fast

  one dense packed particle too hot to keep

  and the fingers had suddenly sprung open

  and the burning coal, the radiant mechanism

  had burst and scattered the seeds of everything,

  out through what was now space, out

  into the pulse of time, out, my masters,

  out, my friends, so, like a darting shoal,

  like a lion’s roar, like greyhounds released,

  like blown dandelions, like Pandora’s box,

  like a shaken cornucopia, like an ejaculation –

  I was amazed at the beauty of it all,

  those slowly cooling rosy clouds of gas,

  wave upon wave of hydrogen and helium,

  spirals and rings and knots of fire, silhouettes

  of dust in towers, thunderheads, tornadoes;

  and then the stars, and the blue glow of starlight

  lapislazuliing the dust-grains –

  I laughed, rolled like a ball, flew like a dragon,

  zigzagged and dodged the clatter of meteorites

  as they clumped and clashed and clustered into

  worlds, into this best clutch of nine

  whirled in the Corrievreckan of the Sun.

  The universe had only just begun.

  I’m off, my dears. My story’s still to run!

  The Early Earth

  (3 Billion BC)

  Planets, planets – they seem to have settled

  into their orbits, round their golden lord,

  their father, except he’s not their father,

  they were all born together, in that majestic wave

  of million-degree froth and jet and muck:

  who would have prophesied the dancelike separation,

  the nine globes, with their moons and rings, rare –

  do you know how rare it is, dear listeners,

  dear friends, do you know how rare you are?

  Don’t you want to be thankful? You suffer too much?

  I’ll give you suffering, but first comes thanks.

  Think of that early wild rough world of earth:

  lurid, restless, cracking, groaning, heaving,

  swishing through space garbage and flak,

  cratered with a thousand dry splashdowns

  painted over in molten granite. Think of hell,

  a mineral hell of fire and smoke. You’re there.

  What’s it all for? Is this the lucky planet?

  Can you down a pint of lava, make love

  to the Grand Canyon, tuck a thunderbolt

  in its cradle? Yes and no, folks, yes and no.

  You must have patience with the story.

  I took myself to the crest of a ridge

  once it was pushed up and cooled.

  There were more cloudscapes than earthquakes.

  You could walk on rock and feel rain.

  You shivered but smiled in the fine tang.

  Then I came down to stand in the shallows

  of a great ocean, my collar up to the wind,

  but listen, it was more than the wind I heard,

  it was life at last, emerging from the sea,

  shuffling, sliding, sucking, scuttling, so small

  that on hands and knees I had to strain my eyes.

  A trail of half-transparent twitchings!

  A scum of algae! A greening! A breathing!

  And no one would stop them, volcanoes wouldn’t stop them!

  How far would they go? What would they not try?

  I punched the sky, my friends, I punched the sky.

  End of the Dinosaurs

  (65 Million BC)

  If you want life, this is something like it.

  I made myself a tree-house, and from there

  I could see distant scrubby savannas

  but mostly it was jungle, lush to bursting

  with ferns, palms, creepers, reeds, and the first flowers.

  Somewhere a half-seen slither of giant snakes,

  a steamy swamp, a crocodile-drift

  in and out of sunlight. But all this, I must tell you,

  was only background for the rulers of life,

  the dinosaurs. Who could stand against them?

  They pounded the earth, they lazed in lakes,

  they razored through the sultry air.

  Hear,

  if you will, the scrunchings of frond and branch

  but also of joint and gristle. It’s not a game.

  I watched a tyrannosaurus rise on its hindlegs

  to slice a browsing diplodocus, just like that,

  a hiss, a squirm, a shake, a supper –

  velociraptors scattered like rabbits.

  It didn’t last. It couldn’t? I don’t know.

  Were they too big, too monstrous, yet wonderful

  with all the wonder of terror. Were there other plans?

  I saw
the very day the asteroid struck:

  mass panic, mass destruction, mass smoke and mass ash

  that broke like a black wave over land and sea,

  billowing, thickening, choking, until no sun

  could pierce the pall and no plants grew and no

  lizards however terrible found food and no

  thundering of armoured living tons disturbed

  the forest floor and there was no dawn roar,

  only the moans, only the dying groans

  of those bewildered clinker-throated ex-time-lords,

  only, at the end, skulls and ribs and hatchless

  eggs in swamps and deserts

  left for the inheritors –

  my friends, that’s you and me

  branched on a different tree:

  what shall we do, or be?

  In the Cave

  (30,000 BC)

  Dark was the cave where I discovered man,

  but he made it, in his own way, bright.

  The cavern itself was like a vast hall

  within a labyrinth of tunnels. Children

  set lamps on ledges. Women fanned a hearth.

  Suddenly with a jagged flare of torches

  men trooped in from the hunt, threw down

  jagged masses of meat, peeled off furs

  by the fire till they were half-naked, glistening

  with sweat, stocky intelligent ruffians,

  brought the cave alive with rapid jagged speech.

  You expected a grunt or two? Not so.

  And music, surely not? You never heard

  such music, I assure you, as the logs crackled

  and the meat sizzled, when some with horns and drums

  placed echoes in the honeycomb of corridors.

  This was no roaring of dinosaurs.

  I joined them for their meal. They had a bard,

  a storyteller. Just like me, I said.

  I told him about distant times. He interrupted.

  ‘I don’t think I believe that. Are you a shaman?

  If so, where’s your reindeer coat? Have another drink.

  If you’re a shape-shifter, I’m a truth-teller.

  Drink up, we call it beer, it’s strong, it’s good.