Her slow-beating heart Written and performed in celebration of Stirling’s 900 year anniversary by Stirling Makar Laura Fyfe 26th April, 2024
She watches us from her ancient perspectives
pooled in a valley between river and hills
If we blanket her in paper and scuff a pencil
she might reveal the moments of relief that mark history
the unwritten time that leaves our books bare
as her seabed curves.
Rain whispers in her ear of times
when more than water rolled down her cobbled shoulders;
when we glazed her cleavage in sewer reek and butcher blood.
How we repaid the protection of her wolves who howled their warning.
We used her stone to shield our children from those who’d roughly woo them
but with walls came containment and we forgot her.
Castles are grand in peacetime, but they’re built for war.
When the waters rose we scrambled like fleas to her crown.
Royals and regiments came and left.
We made a battleground of her gardens, grew
shadow puppets and stone-lipped monuments.
In her lap, we made a crossroads, built a bridge for goods and Gods.
Winds carve her bones with their own songs of change
glaciers and sharpened metal pass over her and recede.
For the hardships she’s bided
she’s all the more beautiful.
She saves her gifts for those who stay.
We might swim in her and be swallowed by cold,
walk by her rivers and sink beneath her skin.
Where she swells to the sky, we might lie
with bees in the spring of moss and heather
The coiling Forth, mingling tide and hill water:
quicksilver clean, silt-thick fertile and ozone salt.
Slivers of sun strike and cloud shadow on the Carse.
Her deep eyes reflect the sky’s seasons,
the waxing and waning of the moon
the falling of old nights,
the dawning of new days.
Memories of fire.
She has no angels to sing of her,
only her daughters, her sons:
born of strife, hardened by history,
softened by the pulsing of air on her fields
awed by her slow-beating heart.