Two poems recently published in The Eildon Tree

The flibbertigibbet of a house

‘I’ll be safe when I’m enclosed’ Sir Walter Scott’*

(Sir Walter Scott’s motto carved into the gateway at Abbotsford.)

Within the bounds of his rambling

residence he assembled books in

thousands, countless treasures,

his talismans, many intimate, some fake:

Byron’s urn full of Greek bones, a lead

musket ball from Culloden, Rob Roy’s skean-dhu,

a black and gilt harp by Sebastian Erard, a skull

cast from Robert the Bruce, two Tollbooth keys,

a blunderbuss and Raeburn’s portrait

with dogs, Camp and Percy. Against invasion

he bought up land, transformed his house

and furiously wrote while drawing all about him.

And though it’s all still there he barely lived

two decades at his beloved Abbotsford.

The Writing Cabinet

‘Afflavit Deus et dissipantur’

‘God blew and they were scattered’

(Inscribed on a silver plate on

Sir Walter Scott’s writing cabinet)

This is how it might have been.

Sixty-three galleons of the Spanish

Fleet once shipwrecked by fire-ships

and storms after the Armada’s defeat

were cast up on to Albion’s shores.

And picked from the tangle of flotsam

some waterlogged and splintered timbers,

came many years later, into the hands

of a cabinet maker. These pieces of salvaged

mahogany and calamander then crafted

into a legend, into the finest of writing boxes,

all the way from fifteen eighty-eight into

the Regency era. Sometimes a story is too good

to forget, becomes as real as an exquisite, writing cabinet.