Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
The Second Last Friday in April, poems by Hugh McMillan.
The Second Last Friday in April
A faultless steel sky.
Small trees
shudder as buses
carve through puddles
ready to fill.
A couple drift diagonally
across the road to the baker’s,
they are beautiful,
she has kanzashi, he is
tattooed blue all over.
Their Thornhill is not mine:
there is love, and blossom
frames the steak bakes.
Stand us where we did?
Pass me the Bovril
and pepper, my muse!
Each day I set sail
and am washed ashore.
Avanti
Avanti I love you.
I have missed three trains
and yet you are here
with your blue snake shining
allure, your livery, your
carriages lifting and seething
slightly in a sexy way.
You are destined
to go somewhere I will
get off, though I may
not want to, it will be
a place where the rails
go away smoked
with frost.
Avanti let me confess
or cry to you
my faults my passions.
I am dying pasted
to this window here,
this icon of night
and reflected sadness,
joy too, of course.
I am wondering where
in the starry lovely
night I am going?
and all the time I am digging
with a blunt key
in the lining of my
jacket for what I hope
is a plastic bottle of wine.
Poems I admire
So many of the poems
I admire have people
walking through city streets
in rain or fractured sunlight,
they are rushing to meet friends
or imagining they are
and in the process see the faces
of street vendors or hear
the snap of bright
umbrellas opening. There is
a hiss or stir of traffic, trams
maybe, the clouds overhead
remind them of animals at
the zoo, there’s a hole
in one of their shoes
and they stand in a puddle
but don’t feel sorry for themselves
because they are all wrapped
up in rush and watching.
They are nearly all in love
even the old ones
who simply sit on that bench
in the park by the shade
of a linden tree
and spend the day reading
or playing chess. Oh I am
late they say to themselves
or to the ones they meet
at last under a statue who
turn full and wonderful
faces towards them
in one unadulterated
moment of joy.
© Hugh McMillan
Hugh McMillan is a writer and performer who lives in South West Scotland. His last collection ‘Diverted to Split’, was published in summer 2024. In 2021 he was appointed editor of the Scottish Poetry Library’s anthology ‘Best Scottish Poems’ and this year was also chosen to chair the Saltire judges for Best Scottish Poetry Collection of the Year. His cult classic ‘McMillan’s Galloway’ was reprinted in paperback form in May 2023, and ‘Whit If’, his Scottish History poems were reprinted in April 2024 and formed the basis of a successful show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 and 2025.