DUNDEE

DUNDEE             (This plate has been removed for unknown reasons)

John Burnside

The streets are waiting for a snow

that never falls:

too close to the water,

too muffled in the afterwarmth of jute,

the houses on Roseangle

opt for miraculous frosts

and the feeling of space that comes

in the gleam of day

when you step outside for the milk

or the morning post

and it seems as if a closeness in the mind

had opened and flowered:

the corners sudden and tender, the light immense,

the one who stands here proven after all.

THIS PLATE NO LONGER IN PLACE.

Description: Pinned to a boarded up window on a disused building.

Geotag co-ords:56.455030, -2.983750

Date: 25.06.14

TAY BRIDGE NIGHT

TAY BRIDGE, NIGHT

Valerie Gillies

Our train and passengers spin at a height

above sea level, it bottles us

up at the launch of the night.

We grow momentous.

Across ravelling space

piers and girders link,

eyes shine outside, a face

on the blink.

Skeletons make no fuss

when they join arms with us.

If we look vain

they lead us in the train

of their steelbone embrace.

Combining at this point in space,

Strange couplings these:

Youth and joy, fear and disease.

We who are full

of life will fall.

The bony ones arrest

us, clasped to their gridiron chests,

as to the unexpected mate

we feel the pull and gravitate.

Description: Attached to a wire fence on the pavement near theapproach to the Tay Bridge.

Geotag co-ords:  56.451861, -2.988939

Date: 25.06.14

a love lock found near this location.

FOONDRY LANE

FOONDRY LANE   (someone has now painted over this plate)

Mary Brooksbank

There’s a Juter and a Battener

    Sailing up the Tay,

And a’ the wives in Foondry Lane

    Are singing blithe the day.

There’ll be pennies for the bairnies,

    A pint for JOck and Tam,

Money for the picters,

    The auld fowk get a dram.

We’ll gie the secks the go by,

    We canna sew and eat,

And fivepence for twenty-five

    Will no buy muckle meat.

We’ll hae steak and ingins frying,

    Lift oor claes a’oot the pawn,

We’ll gaither wulks and boil them

    In a corn beef can.

PLATE NOW PAINTED OVER

Description: Pinned to a wooden board in Foundry Lane just along from the Reading Rooms.

Geotag co-ords:  56.465018, -2.960866

Date: 25.06.14

MID-CRAIGIE

MID- CRAIGIE    

A.D. Foote

The trees they planted here six years ago

Failed to take root.

Instead, the ground sprouted

Aerosols, dog turds, cans and bottles.

The middle-aged, who still remember the slums

Now older, pass by, hunch-backed,

Looking for something on the ground,

Something of value they lost long ago,

Before these fields were built upon.

Only the ever-living children shout and leap

At their unending play,

Growing up in a different world.

 

Description: Stuck to a brick buttress in an alley at the back of the HappyHillock Shopping Centre.

Geotag co-ords:  56.481757, -2.929573

Date: 20.06.14

DUNDEE

DUNDEE       (This plate has been removed by someone)

Dawn Wood

The Dichty Burn, his backbone

through Dronely above Baldovan-

mills along it and threats

of drowning cats, bad weans-

stretches past the seven arches

at Panmuirfield, to boil,

open-mouthed near Balmossie.

His horns, the Murroes and the Fithie,

Whitfield Burn, his tusk,

Dens Burn circles his Law Hill navel.

His claws, Lochee and the Scourin’ Burn,

erupt at Balgay to grab

for the Pleiades ladies

and the pearl moon;

his wings are at the ready,

the Gorrie and the Gelly,

come the equinox, he’ll rise;

trailing his tail feathers,

Liff and Fowlis,

from Benvie and the Swallow,

they’ll ruffle and settle tomorrow.

A belly full of nine maidens

from Pitempton, says

the old wives tale,

but stricken at Strathmartine.

Maybe a belly full of only rain

something of the city

to thunder in his mind

something of his mind,

tempted and draigled-

pours into brow and bone

of the city.

PLATE NOW REMOVED

Description: Pinned to a tree in a glade on a path alongside the Dighty at the back of Sainsbury's.

Geotag co-ords: 56.481217, -2.888924
Date: 20.06.14

BLACKNESS ROAD

BLACKNESS ROAD

Kate Armstrong

 

This uphill street’s a chimney for the town

A colour-chart of what was made and done.

For centuries the reek of the age of coal

coated the foundry, tenements, two schools and a mill,

painted the city black, the rabbit-brown

sandstone faces black as basalt until one by one

they were knocked down, unwanted, set on fire;

the homes remain. Year upon year

the giants fell. Still there are tiny shops

nesting below the dwellings. A bus creeps

coughing up, does its best, drops off its few.

Great gaps in the buildings now

let light wash in like the stirring sea

into Fingal’s cave. Stone breathes. The windows shine back blue.

Description: Fixed to a chainlink fence in a disused car park.

Geotag co-ords: 56.45992,-2.98733
Date: 11.06.14

CHILDREN SLEDDING IN THE DARK MAGDALEN GREEN

 (update: the benches and poem have been removed by the council)

CHILDREN SLEDDING IN THE DARK MAGDALEN GREEN
John Burnside

We have studied the colours of night:

loan-path ambers, hedges dipped in bronze,

jade-tinted snow

and nothing is wholly true

till we believe:

the sky is glass, the distance is a train,

angels are sealed in the gaps

of walls, their fledged wings

spreading through mortar,

and under the lamps, possessed by the pull of the dark,

these children hold the glow

of the imagined,

perfect and hard, arriving at copper or gold

by guesswork; trusting what’s contrived in flesh

to echo in the rooms of gravity.

POEM NOW REMOVED.
Description:Pinned to the side of a bench on the green.

Geotag co-ords: 56.453, -2.991813
Date: 10.06.14


(These benches have been removed and the poem along with them!
NB to self - don't attach plates to movable objects.)