This week, we are running a pop up shop over the water from where we live, in a place called Gourock. The shop space is on a street full of galleries so always attracts people who love art, as well as the day trippers and the lunch hour wanderers. It has been pretty busy today, with a smattering of sales which were welcome, but I can honestly say that the conversations I have found myself immersed in have been much more important.

A social worker, beaten up by the job, unable to hold back tears. We spent ages talking about the strain and stress of it all and the skew we feel towards kindness in a system that has no recognition of what this look like sometimes.

A pair of former hospice workers, out to meet old colleagues.

A jazz musician fresh from a walk around Arran talking about the frustrations of the music business.

A childrens outreach worker, whose caring heart means that she is the one from her team who does the birthdays and the get-well gifts.

A teacher rejoicing that one of her colleagues has found her way towards something better than the strain of her current job, so she was looking for a gift to send her on her way.

Then there are those discussions that I will call ‘spiritual but not religious’.

Suddenly I find myself sharing the deepest parts of life with others. Perhaps some words in a piece of art have unlocked something. The shape of something half forgotten which then bursts out into the space like a brightly painted trout. I have had several of those today and each one has felt precious. In a world where so many people have left Church and formal religion behind, perhaps art and poetry – even pottery – might be one of the ways we can still connect, first with each other, then with something else, that I would tentatively still call god – even if she takes shapes I no longer know or wish to define.

So I am grateful for our little shop. I even think there will be people I have met today who I will meet again, who will become part of my journey as I hope to be of theirs.

I like this retail business.

I am just getting over a nasty dose of the old Covid and starting to look forward to running a pop-up shop in a lovely space over the water- McGilps.

The shop is a way for us to showcase our pottery to an increasingly art-interested Inverclyde. This will be our second time in McGilps, and last time I loved it. So many good conversations, and we sold some work, allowing us to continue doing what we do. Alsongside this trading, we have also tried to put on a couple of events, including a poetry reading or two.

In fact, the poetry evenings are starting to take a rather lovely shape. I choose a theme, then spend a long time gathering poems. I always start with a few favourites (including some of my own) but then the discoveries begin, though internet searches or dips into half-forgotten books.

The trick then is to make people feel welcome, comfortable and safe. This cannot be guaranteed despite our best effort, as the chemistry of a human gathering is partially imported and not fully manufactured in the moment. The last McGilps gathering was special though- one of those evenings which live on in the spirit long afterwards.

Next Thursday evening, we go again. You are invited. It will be free this time (last time we charged twenty quid, but it felt wrong to charge for such a beautiful space) although we will take donations for the Amos Trust.

This time we ill be exploring poems of protest and resistance. I have written a lot of these, perhaps too many. Poetry always seems to give important voice to oppressed people. The thing is however, protest poems are not just strident protest, not just the calling out of the powerful and the politics of justice. To illustrate my point, I offer you a teasers of one of the poems I hope we will read on Thursday. It may seem long, but it won’t when you read it.

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What He Thought

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

.

We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the mayor, mulled

a couple matters over (what’s

a cheap date, they asked us; what’s

flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:

the academic, the apologist,

the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib—and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated

sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.

Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,

so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome

(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)

to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.

I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book

back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there

we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,

till, sensible it was our last

big chance to be poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked

                                             “What’s poetry?”

Is it the fruits and vegetables and

marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or

the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn’t have to think—”The truth

is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed

taught me something about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out,

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,

brought to be burned in the public square

because of his offense against

authority, which is to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government, but rather is

poured in waves through all things. All things

move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is

the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him

forth to die, they feared he might

incite the crowd (the man was famous

for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That’s

how they burned him. That is how

he died: without a word, in front

of everyone.

                     And poetry—

                                        (we’d all

put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on

softly)—

                  poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

Heather McHugh, “What He Thought”, from Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 © 1994 by Heather McHugh and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress