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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Quiet Glasgow Night – Draft

I’m looking over some of the scraps of poems I’ve got lying about. This isn’t on my usual beat, but before I get back there – poems about irises and archaeology and (probably) a lot of wet leaves, what do you think? The oddness of all those incidents haunts me.

Quiet Glasgow Night

The drunk man rails at the statue.
Waste of space. Tosser. Fanny merchant.
Fanny merchant. Fanny merchant.

Dewar stares doggedly down the street.

Three boys film the skater who jumps
the railings, meets the board,
crashes at the foot of the steps.
He shakes his wrist. His knees are covered
with blood and bruises. He jumps again.

Two phones deliver, “I’m on the train.”
The blonde opposite marks up a chapter
on problems designing steam turbines.
The metaller across from me
takes out a guitar, fills the carriage
with Smoke on the Water.


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3 responses to “Quiet Glasgow Night – Draft”

  1. Gordon Mason Avatar

    Elizabeth, I like how ‘rails’ in the first line develops into the train events in the last stanza. And the honesty of what the drunk said. And the great images in the train.

    What I find difficult is the heading and the last stanza. Suddenly we jump from the streets with the skater into the train so we have two different places where the action takes place. Is it still in Glasgow or on a moving train outside Glasgow? Are there two separate poems in fact?

  2. Elizabeth Rimmer Avatar

    Useful comments, Gordon, thank you. It was a journey from the CCA to the station and then home on the train, so it works better in my head than if you weren’t there!

  3. iNd!@nA Avatar

    i enjoyed this journey…

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