A declaration

I am a Pictish child
who starved to death
after our crops were burned
by some well-fed warlord
to intimidate another
in whose praise the bards
first elevated speech to poetry,
in the Age of Arthur, long ago.
They never sang a song for me.

I am a child of Dalriada
who perished in the pestilence
which the saints told us God sent
to punish us for the sins
described in their Vulgate
and by their desert fathers,
sins which explained our misery.
But I was happy until they came.

I am the infant daughter of MacWilliam,
brains bashed out against the mercat cross
one dreich day in Forfar:
a lineage extinguished, a dynasty defunct,
to throttle the bifurcations of history
as had been publicly proclaimed in advance.
But what do I know of ambition?

I am the nameless child
ripped from its mother's womb
in the streets of Berwick
after the three days of its siege and sack
before the flower of our chivalry were captured
at Dunbar, and the country fell,
and the chronicler recorded how the manner of my death
seemed to exceed even the most medieval of excesses,
and prompted churchmen to ask a king
to call a halt to the atrocities.

I and my twin brother were miscarried
before we could be baptised,
dying along with our mother
in the smoke and straw and turmoil
as the blazing thatch collapsed
when they burned us out
to clear the land for sheep.

I took my last breath
before I could speak my first word
when I succumbed to tuberculosis
in the slums of the Calton.

And since you exported these extravagant atrocities
that you had practised on each other
in the narrow corridor of our Scottish centuries
to fulfil some broader civilising duty you say God ordained,
I am the American child skewered by a sabre
as I fled the cavalry, running between our lodges
while my people's land was seized to satisfy your cupidity,
- or rescued from our savagery, as you would have it -
to submit to the grim teleology of commerce,
the plough, and the long-horned herds of alien ungulates
that replaced the buffalo you machine-gunned to extinction
from the trains you dispatched across the metal web
you spun across our prairies,

that grim teleology that dictates
the dark declining climate of our fates:
that everything is just a means to an end,
in which the end of everything awaits.

I am a child taken from its mother's arms by the sea
and drowned as we seek these less hostile shores as refugees,

and the very language in which my mother named me,
whose lilt and grace animated my now forgotten name
has itself been forgotten.

I am silence.

I am that mute substratum of your loud history
that has no voice. I am that bloody backdrop
to your every great exploit. I am the sawdust
swept from the stage before the curtain is raised
and you step forth to perform your epic and inspiring tale.
I am every untold story lingering in the interstices of your syllables.
I am the ghost that convects and coils through the shafts of light
that project your favourite blockbuster onto the silver screen.
I am every blank page, every pause, every unseen presence
loitering at the back of the darkened auditorium.

But I will be heard now, and it is not for honour
- for what honour is there in being a victim of history,
in being the silt and ashes which settle in unseen anoxic depths,
to form the compacted layers upon which the future struts -

nor for glory - for what glory is there
in being disposed of and stamped down and ignored,
suffocating under wasted generations in the landfill of history -

nor for riches - for there no recompense for annihilation,
no coin that compensates for my enforced absence -

that I speak up, but for freedom
- freedom to be born, freedom to grow,
freedom to learn and love and know
the rain and sun and wind and snow,
the seasons turn and years unfold -

for freedom, yes, and that alone,
which no good man gives up but with his life.
The same freedom which I never gave up,
but which was taken from me, with my life,
when I became a victim of your history,

and I call on you now for restitution,
for resurrection, for restoration, of my dignity
in the dignity you seek to establish for yourselves.
Give your riches to the beggar. Place that coin
in the hand held out where mine has been held back,
and find your glory in the insignificance you embrace,
your honour in the ego you erase. This is my declaration:

make this Scotland, and the world it is in,
a monument to the dignity of all
in commemoration of those who were granted none.
Make this Scotland, and the world it is in,
memorable for the best of reasons,
in memory of those forgotten for the worst.
Cultivate the anonymous ashes of the past
to bring forth a blossom so fragrant with freedom
that its celebration effaces my anonymity,

and let there be no more victims of history
in the future you begin to write today
on the first page of this,
my declaration.