The Runners Poem by jim hogg

A dirty old wall ran back and forth
across our little games, but
thoughts of freedom stirred
nothing in us then.
For we were free enough.
Light and fast we flicked about,

(you in that bright yellow cardigan)
before self consciousness came,
before our names were called,
in some kind of order
by the far world.

We
seem only to be waiting now,
here, heavy and slow
at the edge
of some great blowing away...

But we used to jump everything:
over Rhododendron branches and fences
and under thick bushes into a wasp's nest
you clattered with a stick,
so hard a squadron flew out,
flattened all the old houses
and left deep wounds in the flesh of the fields
as we fled less than fast enough
past jimmy bell just asking why

And later at the station house
where trains no longer stopped,
police came out of the shadows once
and took us away in a book.

I didn't know what to say for years
but can't stop talking now
about all the things I couldn't, then.

Everything seemed closer of course.
Even that dark forbidding loch,
- where suicides consigned
all theirhidden hinterlands -
down the hill fromthe railway line
looked near enough to clocker in
but edged away
from almost every arcing stone.

and everlasting leisure -
some of the seers decreed
wouldsoon be ours for good,
and so we dreamed
- in hardly more than twenty years
(though nineteen eighty four
was easily forever away then) .
Fancy robots and clever cars
would roam and reshape possibilities,
channel our gifts and banish stress,
and why would there even be debt?
The common good would rule they said.

And none of us laughed at all.
The master of heads was no fool.
He taught us all for years
and fished for herrings out the loch,
when there still were millions to seethe,
in a little boat with cans of beer
and sometimes my father
with his cunning hooks.

They dreamed the old fox Wilson's dreams,
and believed the war they carried in them
would level out erratic mountains
invisible hands would always shape.

And every one of us kept stumbling on,
to all the places we cling to now,
for some kind of safety,
here in the foothills
far from the wars we forgot to fight,
our children in the trenches
with their arsenal of flattened dreams
and the withered dignity we bequeathed.


And now,
like sunspots gone astray,
some of us have fired up,
and sent out crazy rays,
shattering the pretty prisms
that life used to be visible through,
or set about fixing our broken paths
with the energy the end endows;
and the rest of us admittedly,
still lunge enthusiastically into
the gushing bomb-hole of ourselves,
mainly for laughs I'd like to think

You saw our blindness clearly
as we walked and walked the nights
around our centre of the world
and probably saw your own
on the walls of that back lane bookie's
or in the clinking ups and downs
in the lights in the Bridge.
Sometimes it must have seemed as if
nothing really mattered.

A bunch of us loved each other then
and surely we should cry forever
for the beatings we took unwittingly
between the nursery rhymes and the useless gods
all the wise men swore would carry us.

I hear you're building wings now
down in that valley by the loch,
waiting alone for the reckless wind
that blew those ragged squares we threw
back over our heads and out of sight,
into another world.

21 11 13

(For some old Castle Kennedy pals)