Scotch Measure (Part One)

Old men, see, when I was young,

were different men.

Carved like figureheads of fright,

creatures of night, worse than the dead,

some of them.

Auld callans born when Victoria

surfed the waves,

Methuselah men with bunnets

welded to cast iron heids,

where nothing was bidden to enter

but what they thought was so.

Ancient so-and-sos,

kings of malcontent,

hell bent, some of them,

to make young lives a misery.

 

Bad granddads, coupons like leather,

that would have cracked if a grin

had dared to intrude,

bad mood grandpas who'd

weathered worse things that

we'd ever dreamed,

and let you know it,

who damned any wonder with faint praise,

stripped the joy from any ceilidh,

like bad fairies at the birth of mirth.

 

Or so I thought for years.

But was there a secret faun at the heart

of some such auld anes?

Some secret delight well hid

in their Cairngorn, graceless faces?

For, as I venture towards 

their their territory in terms of years,

I fear not the end of things,

but the beginning of becoming

how they seemed,

men of a single note,

unbending even unto death.

For much of  this was a fear

of not giving themselves away,

or being told constantly not

to strive to seem better

than any who stood alongside them.

 

Old men, themselves raised in the shade

of sabbatarian forebears,

stricken by Sabbath misery forever,

when they were laddies who should

have been treated better.

Products of east coast Scotland

silent malaise seeping down centuries,

drummed into to be no better

than the sum of their tribal fears.

 

Angus men, from Mearns and Fife,

generations cowed down the by overshadow

of something never explained.

I see your tattie bogle shadows,

fore-faithers of the gloaming,

measure your now tongueless tread,

as quiet now as ever you were

badly taught to be.

And I see beyond the tattered, rigid

sailcloth of your bearing,

still worn as your shroud,

see the North Sea blue steel

shining through with true.

I see the wonderment

of your want to dance.