Although they are silent we know we walk with them

This poem is taken from the pictured - and truly wonderful - Edwin Morgan collection, first published in 1997:


The Dead

It is not true to say they are not here,
the dead. Never gone but never clear,
they puncture the room, the street, so near

you see the eyes set deep in others' faces,
some gesture that hooks out buried embraces
of how long back: other places, other cases.

Although they are silent we know we walk with them.
There needs to be no sorry stratagem
of note or phone, wave, grin, kiss, shout, tugged hem

to feel the virtue of the underlying presence
going out and out, spreading like an essence
that fills and spills and falls and never lessens.

How can living shapes be so invaded?
The unpersuaded cannot be dissuaded -
as if the red of dead leaves never faded!

It fades, yes it goes white and skeletal
until at last there is no leaf at all,
a vein or two, a mulch, a pith, a scrawl

like this on paper which remembers it.
I ask you who are dead if it takes grit
to people shadows when the lamps are lit

in Glasgow of this old world you once knew,
or if whatever has been loved comes through
if those who want it to are still and true.

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Edwin Morgan (1920 - 2010)

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