Over the last few days I have had the chance to get out and walk a bit more. I am fortunate to be only a couple of minutes from a beach that goes on for miles and with the coming of much colder and frostier days it has been a quieter place. As I walked along the pristine, settled and perfect sand marked only by the currents of the cold sea I was reminded of Jackie Kay’s New Year poem, The Promise:

Remember, the time of year

when the future appears

like a blank sheet of paper

a clean calendar, a new chance.

On thick white snow

You vow fresh footprints

then watch them go

with the wind’s hearty gust.

Fill your glass. Here’s tae us. Promises

made to be broken, made to last.

At the start of 2021 after a year which has brought much trauma and heartache there is indeed a sense of a ‘clean calendar, a new chance.’ There are still inordinate challenges to face in terms of Coronavirus not least in terms of the roll-out of the vaccines and ensuring equity of treatment and response. But the opportunity for a new chance, has perhaps never been more the case than it is for social care services and supports in Scotland. We have the findings of the Independent Review of Adult Social Care due later this month, combined doubtless with significant debate as the political parties gather their policies together to present to the Scottish electorate in May. There will be a lot of talk and chatter about care. So, after decades of political obfuscation and silence, the time has finally come for social care to become a central actor rather than a small walk-on-part on the political stage. This will be a critical year for the future of social care in Scotland. I hope it will be a year where we do not miss the opportunity of making a real difference and where we can also avoid the pitfalls of party-political wrangling where ambition is placed ahead of reality and truthfulness. I hope it will be a year of promises made to be kept not to be broken.

Yesterday Scottish Care launched a further contribution to that debate. It is an encouragement to folks to make it a ‘new year resolution’ to shape the positive future of social care. Back in November 2020, Scottish Care developed the concept of a ‘Social Care Garden’ through its Collective Care Futures programme as a way to imagine and share our vision for the future of social care in Scotland. This was included as part of the ‘What If & Why Not’ submission to the Independent Review of Adult Social Care.

Scottish Care is now taking this a step further by inviting people to be part of this collaborative vision for the future to capture our collective aspirations. To do this they are curating a ‘Social Care Mosaic’ for the Care Futures Garden.

Through the ‘Social Care Mosaic’ they aim to capture the imaginations of the people of Scotland to better understand the values of social care and generate collective action to support the wishes and dreams people have for this context for the future. You can share your ‘tile’ for the mosaic by sending a virtual postcard to  https://scottishcare.org/social-care-mosaic/

So, what would I put on my tile? What are my hopes and aspirations for social care in 2021? What are the promises I want to see lived out?

A promise to people. Social care is first and foremost about people. It is not a series of transactions and tasks; it is not about services and supplies. It is not about ‘doing to’ but working alongside. It is not telling and instructing but listening and adapting. It is not about creating a service and expecting the person to fit into the shape of what you offer and allocate, but changing the system and the services to be shaped around the needs and wants of the individual. This is a huge challenge – this is not person-centred care but person-led care. It is a disempowering of the centre in order to empower and enable the individual to flourish.

A promise to communities. Social care at its best is about creating conditions where communities of people can flourish through the individual contribution and insights of the individual. It is all about relationship – keeping people connected, independent and autonomous whilst reducing loneliness, isolation and despair. It is an authentic working through of problems rather than an illusory attempt to solve marginal concerns. That is why commissioning 15-minute visits for someone which deny them the ability to relate, to talk, to be and which instead treat them as functional units to be attended to, are so abhorrent to me. Relationship can never be achieved by a timepiece it can only be fostered by the freedom of respect and dignity.

A promise to listen. We have as a society become too accustomed to the voice of ‘informed’ commentators who have not walked in the shoes of those who live their lives receiving support and care, those who work at the care face and those who manage and support. I hope that whatever is designed in 2021 originates from, is resonant with, is consistent to the lived experience of those who are most important, the people who are impacted by social care and the systems politicians, commissioners and organisations create. And let us be careful that we do not just listen to those whose voice is loudest and most articulate, it behoves us to search out those whose silence and diffidence resonates with truth, who are not often included in what we have come to create as an industry of consultation and engagement.

A promise to enable choice. Individual choice and control are at the heart of a human rights-based approach to social care. If you remove them, if you limit diversity, if you create a one-sized fits all, take it or leave it approach, then you reduce the capacity of an individual to take control of their life and to be truly independent. Those who want to keep control and power never want to devolve  choice to individuals. they offer instead the mirage of choice which is limited and safe. real choice is a radical ownership of control by the individual. That is why care is a collaborative activity which upends the expectations of those outside by taking heed of the desires, ambitions, and dreams of those who matter most – the person requiring support and care. That is why the individual has to be the navigator of their own journey, the controller of decisions about their own life. Choice is not the enemy of individual rights, but uniformity just might be.

A promise to resource. Of course, during any election period, perhaps especially one after the trauma of a pandemic, the air will be full of aspiration and promise. But if they are promises and commitments made without costing, without a grip on fiscal reality; if they are sold without a price-tag attached then they are empty, vacuous, dangerous and frankly insulting. We cannot continue as a society to buy care on the cheap and cast blame away from those who originate contracts and allocate budgets. We cannot continue to allow the inequity which sees some have to sell their inheritance to care for their family, and others largely unaffected simply because of the lottery of diagnosis. If we are to truly keep the promise to social care in 2021 then we need a grown-up debate about how we are all collectively going to pay for that care. To do other is to take us all for fools.

A promise to value. Will we get to the stage where the value of those who receive care and support is acknowledged; their contribution as citizens fully enabled , and their role as intrinsic to community recognised? We have still too much passive aggressive dismissal of the central and critical role of those who use support to enable contribution. Will we finally not just ‘clap for carers’ but create systems of properly commissioned contracts which reward workers and value them properly, with terms and conditions that are equal regardless of who the employer is. Will we end the shameful hypocrisy of one part of the system lauding itself for being fair in employment and practice yet purchasing care from others in a way that prevent equality and fair work. Care needs to be elevated from an after-thought to become a mirror of our society at its best.

A promise to be ambitious. Ambition here is not about model or structure, about ownership or system. Ambition is about humanity. Will we seek to create a social care system where the citizen has control and autonomy, where power rests with the individual rather than the State, where the ingenuity of inventiveness is encouraged just as much as the predictability of the routine? Will we create a system where the pathway from home to hospital to home or care home is led by the needs of the individual rather than the professional; will ‘professionals be on tap or on top’? Will we create models where the person most affected is the evaluator of quality and where improvement is an exercise of mutual creativity and reciprocal trust? Will we be pulled and stretched by the creativity of our collective ambition or limited by the constraints of the predictable and familiar?

Lots of promises, lots of hopes and all of them rest on our working together not apart, seeking the interests of the many not the few.

 I finish with the words of someone who to my mind is one of America’s greatest living poets, the environmentalist W.S.Merwin. It is a poem on the importance of keeping hope alive, and I really do trust that the promises for social care keep being fulfilled in 2021. I yearn for a year where  the promise of social care to transform our common humanity grows into fulfilment, rather than have that promise lie shattered in the fragments of our hoping:

To the New Year

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

 

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

 

W.S. Merwin, “To the New Year” from Present Company (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by W. S. Merwin.

 

 

Donald Macaskill

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this last blog of 2020, I find it difficult to do anything other than reflect on the events of the last ten months.

Throughout my childhood I was brought up with an awareness that remembering the past in all its joy and pain, putting together the stories of sadness alongside memories of happiness, was not escapism and delusion, but rather essential and intrinsic to living life to the full. Indeed, failing to do so prevented you from moving forward into both a personal and a collective future.  Remembrance is essential for a person and a people to be and become whole.

In my upbringing I was reminded of the truth of this reality every time I looked out of the window of my mother’s croft house in Glendale, Skye, towards the distant hill on the other side of the glen beyond which was the small township of Borreraig. In that clachan of crofts, the great MacCrimmon family had for generations lived and held sway. They were the exemplars of the great tradition of piobaireachd music for the Scottish bagpipes. “MacCrimmon’s Lament” is perhaps the most famous and is often played at Highland funerals, dating  back to the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Within piobrocheead the classic theme of the music is one of lament, which itself is a form in literature, art and music that constitutes some of the oldest creativity in the world.

Lament is not a wallowing in the pain and distress of the past, but rather a gathering up of the threads of brokenness until they are woven into a rhythm of resonant recollecting. To lament is to mouth or sound out one’s pain, to seek to make sense and to simply be present in grief. Its insight is that the act of grieving and remembering are woven into our humanity. We cannot have hope unless we remember.

At the start of the year when in February along with colleagues I was writing a Guidance document for Coronavirus for the care sector, few of us could have imagined the nightmare which would begin to unfold both across the world and in Scotland. Most of us thought that as we went into lockdown that we would be talking a few weeks at most – never many months. None of us could have fathomed the depths of loss and desolation that would become the experience of thousands  especially in our care homes.

There will be time for examination and investigation, for Inquiry and Review, but as this year comes to its closing, I earnestly believe that it is more important than ever that we take time to remember every single individual who has lost their lives both directly to the virus and as a consequence of the pandemic and our precautions.

Throughout this year and in this blog I have shared stories of dozens of folks, some I have known, others who started as strangers, but mostly of those who have struggled with grieving and loss, with absence and loneliness in these Covid times. I have never been so privileged as to have become the companion of such lives.

The daily arithmetic of statistics on TV or media can sometimes deaden our appreciation of the truth that behind every single number there is a story of a man, woman and child; a mother, father and brother; a lover, husband and wife. Each one known to someone or maybe to too few, some sadly known to me personally but most of them people whose parting and death have brought aching emptiness and sorrow.

Behind every number there is a face which will never again break into a smile of recognition or with glinting eye welcome family and share laughter.

Behind every number there is a life cut short, stories and tales untold, ambitions and dreams unfulfilled.

Behind every number there was someone who mattered, who lived and breathed, who left a mark on the earth they were bound to and to which they will return.

Behind every number, there was someone who was the whole of life, the totality of everything, the purpose of someone’s loving.

Behind every number was someone who still had laughter to share, forgiveness to offer, and a future to unfold.

Behind every number was someone who was birthed into being through pain and love and now is no more.

And therefore, we must never forget or be allowed to simply grow accustomed to the numbering of loss and the predicability of this pandemic.

I lament not just for those who have died from Covid but all who have died in a year unlike any other without the assurance and strength, without love and family.

I lament for those who have been unable to celebrate the lives of those they have lost and be together in love through ritual and recollection.

I lament for those who have lived their lives cocooned in protection but hidden from love, absent from the touch of family, distant from the reach of embrace.

I lament for those who have struggled with the anguish of losing their jobs, of disappearing self-worth, whose sense of self and purpose has disintegrated.

I lament for those who have been confronted by the demons of addiction and the anguish of their inner self, wracked by mental distress and trauma of memory.

I lament for those frightened by the fear of this pandemic to a point that they have lost their joy and hidden themselves away from hope.

I lament for those who are simply tired and weary of worrying and protecting, of masking and distancing, of working and encouraging, of being there, and being present for others.

There is much to lament for and there is necessity to do such.

2020 demands from us the spirit of lament, not one that settles in the distress of days gone by but one that seeks through that recollection to give energy to a determination to do things differently, to be better, and to change our future.

In my mother’s tongue December which is bringing this awful year to its end is called an Dùbhlachd, which means literally ‘blackness.’ But in the oral tradition of my grandmother, it is also a word which has within itself the sense that December is a time which also brings us the stirring of the seeds of hope and renewal. This last week I have watched the winter solstice and the slow turning of the seasons towards the lengthening of days. There is within an Dùbhlachd a sense of renewal and turning. Nothing stays dark forever. There is nothing more powerful than the flicker of light in the deepest darkness.

So, the day after we have celebrated Christmas, which for many was the strangest and saddest of days, and in the between time of our festive celebrations, I will lament and mourn, I will remember and grieve … but over time the words and the music of such sadness and loss which 2020 has given will become distant and disappear into silence. Tomorrow and the next day I know that I will need – as all who grieve – to turn my face to the dawn, to rise up and to face that future. The lament will become an echo, a memory, but one whose sound will remain inside for ever.

Lament

Being old did not define them
the lives they lived
the lives they gave and made
through hardship and hard work
with few if any luxuries.
The loves they loved and gave,
the hugs, the smiles,
some tears, much laughter.

They were our mums and dads.
We gave them the joy of our children
to make them great and grand for another generation.

This is who they were.
They were not expendable.

We are not the herd.

In memoriam for Pat Cooper b 14.09.1925 d 28.03.2020

Trish Davies
Deputy Chair, Relatives & Residents Association

 

Donald Macaskill

On Monday December 21^st  and for the next couple of days until Christmas Eve in the early evenings along with many others I will be looking up into the sky hoping it will be cloudless as I attempt to see evidence of one of the celestial rarities. I will be searching for what is called the Great Conjunction which is the coming together of Saturn and Jupiter in their closest alignment since 1226.  The event happens  when the solar system’s two largest planets appear side by side in a “great conjunction” above the horizon soon after sunset.

It has been reported that the Vatican believes that the original Star of Bethlehem may have been such a Great Conjunction. Be that as it is may at the end of the coming week, we will be celebrating the Christian festival of Christmas. It will be a time of especial importance to those of Christian belief but even to the millions of others who are not Christian, Christmas Day has a significance way beyond its 24 hours. This year we will be spending the day in very different ways to the norm. This will be exceptionally hard for many not least those who have been separated from their loved ones for too long in care homes and in community.

Twenty-nine years ago, I was privileged to spend some time in Bethlehem and in Israel-Palestine in general. Bethlehem is a town of modernity etched with memory; its significance as a place of new beginning and possibility is worn wisely upon its ancient shoulders. It was also beyond the romanticism of tourist trinkets and pilgrim souvenirs, a place of grinding poverty, inequality and discrimination. But one of my lasting memories of my time there was that it and its predominantly Palestinian inhabitants were singularly proud of belonging to a place of becoming, of being citizens in the birthplace of the Christ. I remember talking to someone there and quizzing them about what was special about the place given that there was huge historical and archaeological debate and scepticism about most the so-called ‘holy sites.’ The response was simple, ‘This is a place where the ordinary is turned into the extra-ordinary.’

There is indeed a truth in that analysis. Throughout the history of both the cultural and theological depiction of the birth of the Christ, there is an inescapable simplicity of interpretation, which would contend that this is all about the ordinary becoming extraordinary. In a turning of the tables of expectation Christians believe that divine power and omnipotence incarnates itself into the fragility of flesh and blood. The power of the universe and creation is imaged in the vulnerability of a new-born, defenceless child. The assertion is that the extraordinariness of divinity becomes the ordinariness of humanity, and by this the Christian story asks for the elevation of humanity in all its reality, vulnerability and pain.

So, next week when I look to the skies, I might not be searching for a Star of Bethlehem, and given the Scottish weather I might not even see a Great Conjunction, but I will spend time reflecting on the truth that it is in the ordinariness of our living that we are surprised by the extraordinary, that wonder and awe is enshrined in our humanity lived at its best.

And as I reflect, I will know deep down that the year that has passed has evidenced that truth. We looked out from lockdown and watched folks going about their daily work despite carrying the burden of fear. They were ‘ordinary’ people doing ‘ordinary’ jobs which on any other day and at any time would have gone unnoticed, unheralded and poorly rewarded. They were the home carers, the cleaners and supermarket staff, the nurses and bus drivers, the care home staff and hospital porters. They were evidence of the ordinary being turned extra-ordinary.

As most of us sat cocooned in safety away from the virus, we witnessed communities coming together in acts of generosity and kindness, finding solidarity in the midst of suffering, and supporting one another to be our better selves. Whilst the air may have been tangible with absence and isolation, there was also as sense of mutuality and concern, which went way beyond the clapping of a Thursday night or the platitudes of politicians.

Christmas is about turning the tables of expectation upside down. The coming days will undoubtedly be filled with concern and anxiety for many, regret and loneliness for yet more. They will be days of memory when the absence of a loved one who has died will ache particularly hard. There will be moments when Christmas days of the past, togetherness and laughter will fill memory and bring tears. But I hope it will also be a time when we think of those who have given to others in so many ways in the months that have passed. They have given to each of us the priceless gift of compassion and community. This may be a Christmas less ordinary but it is also one whose strangeness should give us space to reflect and remember, to be thankful for and to commit to being different and better.

One of the most famous poems of this season is the ‘Journey of the Magi’ by T.S.Eliot. Written nearly a 100 years ago, and now most definitely of its time, it describes the experience of the Magi, the ‘wise men’ of our childhood nativity stories who followed a celestial happening to arrive at the birth of a baby. In one glorious phrase Eliot describes them changed by the experience of following that star to see birth contradict expectation. The experience transformed them forever so that they could not go home to the routine predictability of their past life. ‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,’

I hope that whatever we do on Christmas Day and whoever we are with, that we might look to the skies and spend some time thinking of those whose ordinariness of living and loving in the last nine months has the potential to transform us all, and as we do to remember those for whom this season is one of sadness and absence, and who this year will be more alone than silence. I hope we will give space and time to all those unnoticed and unloved. I hope that we can all have the courage to find a determination to learn from the pain of the last few months and commit not to return to the way things have been or still are, but to walk together into the creation of a new, more human way of being. I hope that we will carry with us into that future the gift of ordinary loving made extraordinary.

Happy Christmas  when it comes.

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

T.S.Eliot, Faber and Faber.

 

Donald Macaskill.

Regular readers will know that my family roots for generations are in the peat and crofts of Skye. My own parents were the first of their line to venture permanently from their villages to seek livelihood elsewhere. They were representative of thousands who sought economic security and prosperity away from the straths and glens of their upbringing. In the years after the wars of the 20^th century echoes of emptiness began to fill once vibrant places. My parents were part of the so-called ‘Highland Diaspora’ which formed in the cities of the central belt and most especially Glasgow. Indeed, my late mother used to say that she heard more Gaelic spoken on the Dumbarton Road in Patrick than in her own home village. So much so that my earliest memories are filled with recollections of ceilidhs, song, poetry and entertainment which almost became a weekly ritual of re-connection, a binding back to home and a renewal of identity. What they found in their newly adopted city was a place of welcome, a people open with practical ways of making you feel that you belong, neighbours able to catch hold of hurt and offer healing, a place willing to learn from the stranger and change when it was needed, a community moulded by warmth to make the stranger feel at home.

But despite a real sense of belonging, I also always felt in my parents a sense of dislocation and tension. They loved Glasgow and it’s in your face realness and freedom, but they also ached for the abandonment of hills and the warmth of Hebridean belonging, they yearned for the familiarity of language and dialect, for the predictability of the changing landscape of their childhoods. They were in every sense of the word migrants in a city of tenement and sandstone, and maybe it’s not surprising that their friendships were often with those who knew the rhythm of their own heritage and sensed the timbre of their own tale. It is maybe not surprising that my mother especially formed friendship so easily with those who came new to the neighbourhood, regardless of which part of the world they came from. In their eyes she saw the sense of yearning but also the desire to belong.

It is I suspect because of the sense of being the child of those who had not fully settled, those who felt at first strangers amongst the people around them that I have always warmed to the experience of the incomer, the migrant, and the new arrival.

A lot of those emotions came back to me last week when I received an email from someone I know who works in a care home. She is Polish and with her family has made Scotland her home over the last decade and a half. Her letter was one of both gratitude, sadness and anxiety. Like many others in our care homes during Covid19 she has gone above and beyond in compassionate care for those who she supports. She is no less committed to ensuring the dignity of residents today than she was at the start of the year. But what has changed is a growing sense within her that she is increasingly not welcome, not by her colleagues, her community or even her nation. Rather she expressed a deep concern about the implications both of the Brexit negotiations and also what the new measures on UK immigration might mean for others she knows. She described a growing media rhetoric and political tone which has made her feel she is not needed, not wanted and not welcome. I find it deeply sad that she is so unsettled by a political environment which has created such uncertainty, division and at times xenophobia. The contribution which she and so many thousands of others have made over the years to making Scotland into the place I call home can never be under-estimated. Over 6% of our care workforce in Scotland come from countries in Europe other than Scotland. They have shown themselves to be the best of us, full of life and love, compassion and care, a living example of how you build community by having an open door rather than a closed gate. Yet in recent weeks and months so many have been made by others to feel unwelcome and unwanted.

Next Friday, the 18^th December, is the United Nations International Migration Day. It is a day to recognise the astonishing contribution of those who leave their place of birth to go elsewhere. It is a day to affirm their human rights.

In a very real sense, we are all of us the inheritors of the courage of those who despite all the odds moved from their own place to go out and to seek a better future and a new life, some because of little choice, many because of the ambition of their humanity. Scotland perhaps more than any other nation is a nation of migrants.

The mark of any civilised society is the extent to which you prepare a place of welcome for the migrant. It is a descriptor of the nature of true community which we are increasingly called to protect and advocate for. The UN states that today more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born. While many individuals migrate out of choice, many others migrate out of necessity. In 2019, the number of migrants globally reached an estimated 272 million, 51 million more than in 2010. One of every ten migrants is under the age of 15.

As the son of those who were strangers in a new place, and as I remember those from my widest family who left these shores to go to distant parts of the earth to make their own beginning, I recognise both the ache and the loneliness of their experience, but I also acknowledge the vibrant, ingenuity, contribution and skill brought about by those who together seek to create a new community and a new nation. The Covid19 experience has taught us all how connected we are one to the other across the globe. It has shown that the solidarity of compassion is stronger than self-interest.

Today as I write this blog there is real uncertainty over the future of our relationship with the European Union as Brexit talks go to the wire. But regardless of the traumas ahead one thing I remain convinced of, and that is that to be strong, creative, contributive and compassionate, we need to hear voices that are not our own, dialects which are new to our ears, ideas which challenge our practice, innovation which upsets our predictability – in other words we need to be a nation that welcomes the migrant and the stranger. It is only as we weave together the threads of our common humanity into shared purpose that we create true community and a modern nation.

Years ago, I spent time reading the stories of those who had been immigrants from Europe into North America. Many of these were Scots and I remember looking for my family name on the etched memorial stones of Ellis Island and searching for ancestors amongst the stories of arrival in Canada. Their memories resonated with the feelings of my own parents and forbears who left Scotland.

In Halifax, Nova Scotia, where so many from Skye arrived as strangers, there is a tremendous collection of poetry written by the new settlers, some at that moment, other years later. I end with one of these because its simplicity shows what we gain by being a place of welcome, by having an open door to the world. It shows that what our care sector has cherished the most from its international workforce, is not solely an economic or physical contribution, but rather the dedication of individual hearts which is daily given to create new community. We dare not lose this.

It was a
rough crossing

their landing
delayed by fog

& darkness.
Four of them

travelled inland
knowing nothing

of this land now
theirs. A

lifetime later
the sole survivor

returns to
this place bearing

witness to
an act of courage

recorded now
on fragile paper

& on the surface of
a human heart.

A poem written by Harry Howie, a Scottish Immigrant, who travelled aboard the Aquitania, arriving October 1948 in Pier 2, Halifax.

Donald Macaskill