The Runners Poem by jim hogg

I

A dirty old wall ran north and south
across our little games, but
thoughts of freedom stirred
nothing in us then. Light
and fast we flicked about,
you in that bright yellow cardigan
and little angers that flared,
before self consciousness came,
and all the names were called
in some kind of order
by the far world.
We
seem only to be waiting now,
here, heavy and slow
at the edge
of some great blowing away...

We used to jump everything:
over Rhododendron branches and fences
and under thick bushes into a wasp’s nest
you clattered with a stick
so hard, a squadron flew out,
flattened all the old houses
and left deep wounds in the fields.

That night at the station
where the trains no longer stopped,
the police must have come through the windows
and took our innocence away in a book.
The law was always listening after that;
I didn’t know what to say for years
but couldn’t stop talking later
about all the things I couldn’t talk about then.

II

Everything seemed closer of course.
The dark loch downhill from the railway line
looked near enough to spit in
but none of us could reach it with a stone.
Everlasting leisure would be everybody’s soon.
-no more than twenty years at most.
Robots and intelligent cars,
no reasons to be stressed,
and why would there be debt?
The common good would rule they thought.
We didn’t laugh then.
John Brown was no fool.
He taught us all for years
and fished for herrings out the loch
when there still were millions of them
in a little boat with cans of beer on board
and sometimes my father.
They dreamed the old fox Wilson’s dreams,
and believed the war they carried in them
would level out erratic mountains
invisible hands would always shape.

III

And every one of us kept running,
to where we are now,
here, in the foothills
far from the war we forgot to fight,
our children in the trenches
with their arsenal of flattened dreams
and the withered dignity we bequeathed.

IV

And now,
like a sunspot,
you fire up,
sending out crazy rays towards us
from the past
shattering the fine mesh of atoms
some of us saw it all through once.
and the rest of us admittedly,
still lunge enthusiastically into
the gushing bomb-hole of ourselves,
for who is more important...

You saw our blindness clearly
as we walked and walked the nights
round the centre of the world
but caught no sight of your own
on the walls in that back lane bookie's
or the clinking ups and downs
in the lights in the Bridge.

We all loved each other then
and surely we should cry forever
for the beatings we took unwittingly
between the nursery rhymes and useless gods
all the wise men swore would carry us.

V

I hear you’re building wings now
down in that valley by the loch,
waiting alone for the reckless wind
that blew those ragged squares we threw
back over our heads and out of sight,
into another world.


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jim hogg