THE THISTLE'S CHARACTERISTICS (part 1)
(excerpt from A Drunk Man Looks At A Thistle, read by Hugh MacDiarmid. Music - Space Invaders by The Pretenders . Mixed by The Plagiarist)
The language that but sparely flooers
And maistly gangs to weed;
The thocht o Christ and Calvary
Aye likkenin in my heid;
And aa the dour provincial thocht
That merks the Scottish breed
- These are the thistle's characters,
To argie there's nae need.
Hoo weel my verse embodies
The thstle you can read!
- But will a Scotsman never
Frae this vile growth be freed?...
O ilka man alive is like
A quart that's squeezed into a pint
[A maist unScottish-like affair!]
Or like the little maid that showed
Me into a still smaaer room.
What use to let a sunrise fade
To hae anither like't the morn.
Or let a generation pass
That ane nae better may succeed,
Or wi aa time's machinery
Keep naething new aneth the sun,
Or change things oot o kennin that
They may be aa the mair the same?
The thistle in the wund dissolves
In lichtnin's as shook foil gies way
In sudden spendours, or the flesh
As Daith lets slip the infinite soul;
And syne it's like a sunrise tint
In grey o day, or love and life
That in a cloody bash o sperm
Undae the warld to big't again,
Or like a pickled foetus that
Nae man feels ocht in common wi
- But might as easily ha' been!
Or like a corpse a soul set free
Scunners to think it tenanted
- And little recks that but for it
It never micht ha' been at aa,
Like love frae lust and God frae man!
(from the album A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, part1)
Previously
The Top 20
back
home