Shid ald akwentans bee firrgott
an nivir brocht ti mynd?
Shid al akwentans bee firgot
an ald lang syne?
“I envy you.”
“Why?”
“Your medium – it’s… its form is free. Free-er.”
“You wish your art weren’t the written word?”
“No. See… how’d you write this scene?”
He drew up against the metal frame, legs out over the edge – suspended in a stretch, then dropped to hang there, ‘bove the water.
Inhaling gradually, his chest he filled with wintry afternoon, pressing back into the crane that dried its wings and watched her, with her cheeks puffed out, marking in the sand the seconds that she held her breath, until she startled it by breaking.
Fir ald lang syn, ma jo! Fir ald lang syn…
Wil tak a cup o kindness yet,
fir ald lang syn.
“But how… could a language die?”
She ceased in her caressing of the symbols into sand, proud yet pained at how they lay ephem’ral.
The woman, knelt amongst the linen that she moved ‘n mended, tilted o’er her head, her tan eyes keeping handward.
“Well, Shu may sweep across the land and will away the grooves you practice in vulnerable ground. But even in the rock and on the painted walls – inscriptions carved; reliefs rendered in all their colour – there hides the threat of oblivion. What you’ve written rests behind a seal.”
“But you’ve told me what they mean.” She brushes – light – three fingers through her formed, imperfect hand.
“And if you forgot, and I were gone?”
An thers a han, my trustee feer!
An gees a han o thyn!
And we’ll tak a richt gude willie waucht
fir ald lang syn!
She walked along, alone, beyond the dock ‘n jettied gateway, past the fishery ‘n stockpile house, unto the market plaza. Cartwheels ‘long the roadway; bustle, busy, buzz: delightedly, she looks at all around her.
“Kid, you have a smile on your face like the shoots of corn just right before the waters drown ‘em!”
She side-steps as a zebu’s driven past, its nostrils flared in exhalation; she ducks the horn ‘n pats the sinewed-side ‘n flinches at the tuft-tail whip.
Fir ald lang syn, ma jo!
For old lang ziiiiiiiiiiiiighn!
Wil tak a cup o kindness yet,
fir old lang syn!
Meandering the clearest cluttered paths (all equi-travelled), he greeted those he knew by hand on shoulder.
A swig of rum from offered bottle; a declined empty stool; a skirted around threat of rambling sinking-sand, barside.
“Hungry for something?”
“How’s the food?”
“Poetic.”
She sees the world through rings of colour wrapped about her soul, reflecting – small – the inf’nite moment borne on swells of light.
Should old acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind…
Thus sang the year’s last breath and first
in these old times gone by.
Floating On The Avon By The Floodplains Of The Nile
Day 1 – Sunday 3rd October
william altoft 