VERSES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES	1981–1990
From SALTIRE SELF-PORTRAIT 1988	Poem: Alasdair Gray © 2005
10 – Of The Forgotten

We live and have lived, die and we will die in this city

and millions have been and will be forgotten

with hearts and faces we struggle to keep

until folded in sleep or gone rotten

and most, before dying, give blood to son or daughter

and when the bones of these children crumble, remain

not even memories – names cut on stones, perhaps:

otherwise we are a procession as featureless as water.

And some sit late filling books with tall words till the birds whistle,

trying to see who we have been, and are, and should try to be.

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