Douglas Dunn’s Elegies
A cold night in Kirkcaldy, November,
Winds from the Forth examining the town.
An old college building near the water,
Gusts analysing the windows where my
night school class sits ingesting the poems
about a diagnosis and a death
about a poet searching for redress.
One minute they’re all sitting on their chairs
quietly absorbing the images,
The next, there is a sob of such deep pain:
One woman is in tears, others comfort.
We stop the class and go down for coffee.
Stories about their lives. About their pain –
A lesson for me in what readers bring
out in a poem, conjuring its life
from the raw power of words to hurt and heal.
In the cafe that might a woman talked
about her mum who’d died the year before,
Another talked about a scare she’d had.
The brother of a third receiving care.
The death toll mounted as we sipped our drinks.
We agreed it had been a catharsis –
The poems had read their way inside us,
Had brought out the sadness that we live with,
The consolations of November winds.
Derek Brown lives in Clackmannanshire. He published a book on global citizenship for young people in 2015 and recently completed a novel, A Modern Noah. The poems here are part of a collection, Between an Idea and a Wish.