Auld Reekie Connections, Street Poetry

Haiku for a poet long dead remembered after his death:

Robert Fergusson, 1750-1774

Poetry prevails

beyond a brief, Bedlammed life

flowered words in stone

Just off the Canongate road on the way to take photos for a friend's school assignment and just before my camera battery wore out, I met a poet in bronze. He lived a short life--after falling down stairs at his place of work after his father's death meant he had to stop his education--he spent his last years in Bedlam. But other poets loved him and remembered him and now there is a bronze statue of him so lifelike as he is stopped midstride that I felt obliged to stop and chat with him and add just a few words to the few in the stone that now circumscribes his life.

You can tell it was a sunny day--it was a two poem day

Blackbird singing now

connects summer here and there

summer then and now

I saw a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Calton cemetery atop the memorial for Scottish-American soldiers and helped an old man in a wheelchair scootch up the hill to the bus stop in his wheelchair. The old veterans home is just opposite Holyrood. If we send them to war --I leave it to you to decide if we should, but if we do, then we must look after them--not just the memorials but the living testament to our actions.

In the evening I sat with a woman from South Africa and we knit together. Her grandmother taught her to knit as many grannies do, and I told her about my idea for intergenerational knitting and she liked it. Perhaps when she goes back home to South Africa she'll start an intergenerational knit group in her bead shop. I like to think that she might.