Alistair's poems...
first What Did You Do in the War, Mummy?,
second The Use of Knees
third Networks
My mother was a heroine In her own unspoken way. It had to be done, and she did it Was all she had to say. When I was eight, and my sister Anne Was six, and Jean was four, My mother packed our clothes and dolls And took us off to war. It was on the Furness Withey line, The steamship Nova Scotia, That we stood to be shot at with Some passengers that kept kosher. The destroyers were very lovely. I remember their whooping cry, As they dashed past us to rescue A ship about to die. The Atlantic in late November Is a rough place for a swim. And I guess the u-boat crews threw up As they sent the torpedoes in. We sat below and waited. A thin man wearing a hat Heard I was learning Latin and asked, "What's this we're sitting at?" I told him it was a mensa, And "amo, amas, amat". He gave me an apple, nibbled That night by the cabin rat. We landed safely at Boston But because she couldn't stay We had Christmas presents early And a lonely Christmas Day. My mother waited alone for weeks To sail back home to work She hadn't brought enough money. She couldn't enjoy New York. She was looking forward to sailing From a peacetime city hotel To making-do and rationing, Through dangers she knew well. My nightmares of fifty-odd years ago Come back sometimes: I see My mother on a sinking boat In the dark and fizzing sea. But it was other ships that sank, And other children lost Their dearest person and acquired A deep unburied ghost. We wrote our letters every week, Not really writing home - Communicating with the past From a social vacuum. "It was a great mistake." That's all, For the worst year of your life, When you went out a young mother And came back a childless wife. Alistair Elliot, 1998
Everyone calls it Arthuritis. He has lost the power of bending, the old king father of gods and men, and sits on a low throne by the window, apparently meditating in profile, a memorial coin of sadness as we come carrying our seats. To me he has never before been Arthur: I saw him through his unused name, so fitting for a father born in a Scottish Eden: Adam. Caught in the unfamiliar foetal posture of a bronze age burial, he tries to uncurl and honour us with a smile. Of course he is 'not so dusty'; so he says when asked, but still his legs, locked at a regal angle under the gown, or under sheets, abruptly evoke a coffin humped in the middle like this eiderdown, or a succession of little hammer breaks flattening the folded sediments of those knees. He will have thought of that. He will already know how undertakers solve mortal geometry, keeping calm themselves. And maybe such a man has even seen himself finally dusty, and me on the hill kneeling, releasing the native dust between Corriekinloch and the sand of Loch an Eircill. Alistair Elliot From London Review of Books 13 Feb 92 Also appeared in British Medical Journal as JAE's obituary
End of the party: time to offer friends to the foreigner. - Where are you going, sir? - North for a bit, then west. Ed recommends An Apache sculptor, aura-balancer, Wells Fargo money-minder to the stars, Ethnomusician. Tom and Marion Give me an acupuncturist near Taos, A Persian carpet-dealer in Tucson, A Choctaw woman (pity, no address), A graphics programmer with a private press. Such generous social helpings! In a year I shall have friends to offer these friends to: Expert on hunger, film~sound-engineer, Inventor of the Pill, a southern Jew, A goy psychiatrist, gay classicist, Redneck philosopher, holist, black girl deck-hand, Wigmaker, pulmonary therapist, Yoga carpenter, Chinese diamond-merchant, Hard-riding, yachting septuagenarians... At home, I just know poets and librarians. Alistair Elliot (from "My Country" 1989)