I took this picture in 2015, in Edinburgh, Scotland, on the Royal Mile. This was to promote the Scottish National Poetry Day. I’m not sure if you can see it but this thing is HUGE. It’s a great way to advertise poetry too.
I don’t know the poetry of Elizabeth Burns that well but maybe you do.
Here’s more by her.
“Beautiful Mind”
The things inside his mind are blurring
and drifting like snow, they are settling
into great heaps, burying whatever lay there.
May there be moments that feel as if they were lifted
from his granddaughter’s collage of autumn:
the three pairs of pale gold sycamore wings, perhaps,
with their flying birdshapes echoing one another;
the bend and swoop and line of reddened leaf-stems,
or else the copper beech leaves, so exactly placed,
the white space clear between them, perfect as snow.
“Second Tooth”
The first one came out the week of her birthday.
This second tooth’s harder: she pushes
and pushes at it with her tongue, tries to grip and drag it out.
Nothing comes but blood.
*
In the museum is the jawbone of a child, undated.
A label in fine ink: Upper and Lower Milk Teeth
and first permanent molar.
You can see the next loose milk tooth,
jutting squintly from the lower jaw.
Nobody dislodged it when the child died,
nobody kept that little white seed-pearl.
They left the mouth as it was, when its tongue
could wiggle the wobbly tooth,
and there was almost a gap in the grin.
*
At the school gate she’s clutching the tooth
in a paper towel. It fell out at playtime
just when she’d finished her apple and milk.
That night she wraps it in tissue
puts it under her pillow
with a note for the fairy not to take it away.
In the morning, a shining twenty pence
that she puts with the tooth in her heart-shaped box.
Inside her mouth, the permanent molars,
the teeth of an adult, are pushing and pushing through.
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