Old Lags: Dumfries Prison Poem by Chrys Salt

Old Lag’s don’t dance, and yet they do keep time –
Time’s what they do, reeling with all things done
each quick-step slowing to the measured chime
of clocks that drag each minute through the bone.
Sometimes old tunes from better times replay
like pipes from distant hills that echo down
the dismal corridors then fade away
leaving a silence in which men could drown.
The sullen metronome of day on day
kills more than time inside a prison cell
They step out to an endless roundelay
of dark and light, of clanging door and bell
until there’s no will left to dance at all;
or hear the music through the prison wall.