Poetry and Sleep
Negative Aspects of Being Awake
Ugly Waking
Norman MacCaig
My early morning bird, sweet blackbird, starts
his early morning song. His note
never trembles.
And light begins to creep
along wires and shamelessly
to peer into windows.
I stir as though freed from ropes
and my morning thought begins
to speak in my head.
How its voice trembles.
How it flinches from the window
and won’t look out.
I lie in a wretched darkness with no song in it
and with new ropes on me
made of light.
The City of Sleep
Rudyard Kipling
Over the edge of the purple down,
Where the single lamplight gleams,
Know ye the road to the Merciful Town
That is hard by the Sea of Dreams—
Where the poor may lay their wrongs away,
And the sick may forget to weep?
But we—pity us! Oh, pity us!
We wakeful: ah, pity us!—
We must go back with Policeman Day—
Back from the City of Sleep!
Weary they turn from the scroll and crown,
Fetter and prayer and plough—
They that go up to the Merciful Town,
For her gates are closing now.
It is their right in the Baths of Night
Body and soul to steep,
But we—pity us! Ah, pity us!
We wakeful; oh, pity us!
We must go back with Policeman Day—
Back from the City of Sleep!
Over the edge of the purple down,
Ere the tender dreams begin,
Look—we may look—at the Merciful Town,
But we may not enter in!
Outcasts all, from her guarded wall
Back to our watch we creep:
We—pity us! ah, pity us!
We wakeful; ah, pity us!—
We that go back with Policeman Day—
Back from the City of Sleep!
Betrayal in Morningside
Donald Campbell
Embro my ain, ye are aye meant
to be a city of middle-class douceness
blue-nosed mediocrity
bourgeois obtuseness
but
(listen to what I’m telling ye!)
in the Morningside chippie
I was confronted by no fewer than ten
of the reuchest and teuchest
of your hardest hard men
—and (oh, God!) how I wished I was in Glasgow!
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