The city skyline spiked by spires
The silence ripped by siren choirs
Riding the Marches,walking the Mat
Walking forward , walking back
Exercising ghosts , the hidden city,
Forgotten sites where Byron walked,
Rabbie Burns supped reaming swats,
Boswell and Johnson took Holy Communion,
Seumas Mor heard Jeannie Robertson
singing folk songs in Causewayend
Exercising ghosts , through these streets
Heroin hoodies with ‘heroin gait’,
The changing face of Langstane Place ,
Half built buildings loom in space.
Grass grows out of the Uptown Baths
the smell of chlorine long gone now
Uber-awake in a changing city,
Baristas punt their caffeine fixes
Windmill Brae , a hill of nightclubs
road to the Green, a hill of violence.
In the gardens, the crows await
dark guardians of the Corby Haugh,
Kelly’s cats stand smart with bow ties,
waiting in line for possible change.
Exercising ghosts , down through the Green
Walking the paths of folk from the past.
Up ‘Vicus Fraxini’ , the ash tree’s way,
The earliest street in young Aberdeen.
Round the Mither Kirk, as facts fade in time
and bones are scattered in underground graves.
Above our city , the sky continues, as always,
grey and cloudy.
( From my ages old chapbook ‘Back Wynd of the Mind’ from 2011, this one was my idea of a historical walk around Aberdeen at that time)
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