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Esther Kinsky

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Lambhill

Lambhill,
it sounds like a cry
of street children
in short trousers
and with bare feet
Lambhill, Lambhill
a name of cobblestones
and sky between gables

A story.
A death. Hills
at the edge of the field of vision,
white balls of cloud, a lake
and a bridge and a wood
with blue flowers, as it is said. Red houses
tenements, four storey,
little shops, old women,
a strip of no man’s land,
hordes of children
flowing back and forth there,
mute, only occasionally
crying Lambhill

A bingo hall called Vogue
Concrete inns
Estates, nineteen sixties.
Crematorium, Cemeteries,
black on white, an arrow pointing left.
Lambhill. A broad strip
of deaths, grass, grey stone

between town and country. A wall,
no other dwelling place beyond it.
Hills at the edge of the field of vision.
Sky, much sky, and wind.
A grey stone, a foreign name,
foreign place, blue and white
the flowers in the shadows of the clouds.
A red car rolls past,
a driver, a child,
a woman in the back,
she searches the names on the stones and weeps
Lambhill, Lambhill

No man’s town, no man’s land,
the story
is always in the
head.

Translated by Martin Chalmers

Page(s) 188-189

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