The Blackened Stumps Poem by Garry Stanton

History hangs heavy
In the air,
Anonymous assassin
Pooled still between
Sweating cobbles,

Death haunts this city
In the grey and black,
Particles which are us,
And the past. Genetic markers
in rock and dust.

The cathedral hugs
The stone,
Its elemental home,
Odours of ordure
And bloody torture
Clinging like the stink
Of demons
To the blackened stumps.

And the poor
And the rich
Attached by a stitch
Of time,
United only by time,
Wander eternity,
strangers in parallel.

Teeth and bones
Apart, so alone-
Vibrate and chatter
And clack their auld song,
Abandoned ancient children
Of our gene memory loins.

They are marrow of you and me,
And us of them.

I hear them wake,
The land shivers and shakes
And sinks
And thinks
And rises
And falls
Like ground unsure
Of its purpose.


History sits
Like a weight
On our psyche,
And like fat round our hearts.

But the manacles of Then
Are as nothing to the
Chains of Now.