Poem of the month - June 2007

Black Watch We told you to stick in, you weren’t fooled, just like we made you talk but not talk back. We made you write: 'My Life When I Leave School', You joined the army, ended in Iraq. You never found the irony in Owen or Morgan’s hymns from unironic lips. To get away - it seemed the best thing going, to leave the school, to go and do your bit. For fourth year laddies none of it is real: a game of soldiers up a climbing wall, a helicopter in the playing field and then recruitment in the Dining Hall. A wage, a badge, a uniformed apprentice: we should have said; in loco parentis. William Hershaw Poem supplied courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library

William Hershaw says: 'As may be deduced from the poem, I work as an English teacher and  have published two books on teaching Scots language and literature for Learning Teaching Scotland. My first poems in Scots were collected in 'Four Fife Poets', Aberdeen University Press in 1988. 'The Cowdenbeath Man, poems in Scots and English, was published by the Scottish Cultural Press in 1997. Makars, a sonnet sequence in Scots, published by Akros, will appear this summer.'

About the Poem 'Black Watch' was published in the collection 'Fifty Fife Sonnets, Coarse and Fine, Parochial Petrarchan Poems For Pleasure And Perusal' by Akros in 2006.