Edinburgh, There and Back Again

"And, vow! Tam saw an unco sight!" -Robert Burns, Tam O'Shanter

Short the preps, swift the steps, shrill the Scots air!
Flying fast, flying past, flying somewhere!
Flashing through tunnels and flashing through blue,
To the east, trousers creased, devil may care!

Waverly Station, and -mind your head, please!-
Hubbubed heads roll like a voice or a sneeze
Or a flat rafter's song; no accent is heard
But American twang and faint Japanese.

Through platforms and people, rushing on street,
A cobblestone crack tripped my traveller's feet,
Yawned with the voice of a dead man "Go!"
And melted again to impassive concrete.

Hither and thither a grey morning hies,
Proscenium-arching through indifferent skies,
Down around shoulders like an arm or a noose,
And clammy as the coins on dead men's eyes.

Half-hours together on a lonesome seat,
I watched the warring suits that swept the street,
And half-heard the skirl of a new-born babe,
And half-dreamt the drum of a dying man's feet.

Some that stood gathered like gathering storm,
Huddled together to keep itself warm,
Some that rolled channels down gutters and cracks,
Shapeless stood teeming with disciplined form.

Brollies and jackets and shadows all flit
Flickering like cinema screens small writ.
Poor candles! Yours was an untoward fate,
Extinguished by gobs of heavenly spit!

In Portobello once of a winter's day
We merry few fell where a football lay,
Bruised, bumped, bleeding of a laughed melee,
And Edinburgh then was far away.

Yet come I did, well knowing it would be
No more than this; a phone booth, half a tree
A tartan tea-towel wi' "Scots wha hae"
And Midlothian melted to ring a key.

That half of darkness halved is still abyss,
That no more shines the sun on Leith than Dis,
That there are Scotlands worser than my own,
It needs no grave-fresh ghost to tell me this.

Raw the steel, racked the wheel, rumbling West,
Harsh the hail, hard the gale, homeward the guest,
Rolling through city and rolling through town,
Grey the white on the flight into night pressed.

Thomas Clark