So fill your glass. Here’s tae us.

~ Live & Learn

footprints-in-snow

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.
So fill your glass. Here’s tae us.
Promises
made to be broken, made to last.

– Jackie Kay, “Promise”

Notes:

  1. About Jackie Kay: Jackie Kay (b. 1961) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby by a white couple. Kay’s awareness of her different heritages inspired her first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers, which dramatises her experience through the creation of three contrasting narrators: an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter.
  2. Photographer: Matt Wyles. Poem Source: litverve
  3. Find this poem in Jackie Kay’s Book: Life Mask or in Poems on the Underground by Judith Chernaik

16 thoughts on “So fill your glass. Here’s tae us.”

  9. Happy New Year David. Just to add a cultural context, for me, as a Scot, “Here’s tae us” always conjures up the rest of the toast – just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know it, here it is – “Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us? Damn few! And they’re a’ deid!”
    Have a great 2015

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