Talkin' Heids #4 ~ Liz Lochhead (1947 - )

From a Mouse

It's me. The eponymous the moose
The To a Mouse that - were I in your hoose,
A bit o dust ablow the bed, thon dodd o' oose
That, quick, turns tail,
Is - eek! - a livin creature on the loose,
Wad gar you wail.

Aye, I've heard you fairly scraich, you seem
Gey phobic 'boot Mice in Real Life yet dream
Aboot Man-Mouse Amity? Ye'll rhyme a ream!
Yet, wi skirt wrapt roon,
I've seen ye staun up oan a chair an scream
Like Daphne Broon.

But I'm adored - on paper! - ever since
First ye got me at the schule, at yince
Enchantit - wha'd aye thocht poetry was mince
Till ye met Rabbie,
My poor, earth-born companion, an the prince
O Standard Habbie.

For yon is what they cry the form he wrote in
An' you recite. Gey easy, as you ken, to quote in
Because it sticks. I will allow it's stoatin,
This nifty stanza
He could go to sicc lengths wi, say sicc a lot in -
Largs to Lochranza,

Plockton to Peebles, Dumfries to Dundee,
If a wean kens ony poem aff by hert, it's Me!
Will greet ower ma plough-torn nest, no see
The bit o' a gap
Atween the fause Warld o' Poetry
An baited trap.

Get Rentokil! Get real! Wha you love
'S the ploughman in the poem, keen to prove
- Saut tears, sigh, sympathy - he's sensitive.
Wee sermon:
Mice, men, schemes agley, Himsel' above
Cryin me Vermin.

Ploughman? That will be right! Heaven-taught?
He drank deep o The Bard, and Gray, and Pope - the lot.
I, faur frae the spontaneous outburst you thought,
Am an artifact.
For Man's Dominion he was truly sorry? Not!
'T was all an act.

Burns, baith man and poet, liked to dominate.
His reputation wi the lassies wasna great.
They still dinna ken whether they love to hate,
Or hate to love.
He was 'an awfy man!' He left them tae their fate,
Push came to shove.

Couldnae keep it in his breeks? Hell's bells, damnation,
I wad be the vera last to gie a peroration
On the daft obsession o this prurient Nation,
His amatory antics.
He was - beating them tae it by a generation -
First o th' Romantics.

Arguably I am a poem wha, prescient, did presage
Your Twentyfirst Century Global Distress Age.
I'm a female mouse though, he didna give a sausage
For ma sparklin een!
As for Mother Nature? Whether yez get the message
Remains to be seen.