Readers’ contributions have always been welcome in this space. These poignant lines by Jock Stein of Haddington were prompted by the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster. The second poem, by the Elgin-born cleric Andrew Young, offers a defiant assertion of new life after winter.
LONELY ROADS
(Job, Chapter 28)
Lonely the miner’s path
Digging for gold, digging for coal
Digging for some victory?
More, digging for survival
Lonely the survivors walk
Children, brothers, sisters lost
Aleppo, Aberfan, the Iolaire
who adds up the human cost?
Lonely the philosopher
who lives uneasily inside us
seeking at every pithead
shafts of light to guide us
LAST SNOW
Although the snow still lingers
Heaped on the ivy’s blunt webbed fingers
And painting tree-trunks on one side,
Here in this sunlit ride
The fresh unchristened things appear,
Leaf, spathe and stem,
With crumbs of earth clinging to them
To show the way they came
But no flower yet to tell their name,
And one green spear
Stabbing a dead leaf from below
Kills winter at a blow.
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