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I
Well now, Charlie, look on this.
A fine day’s work indeed.
But no, you can’t, of
course,
for you have
fled the field.
On the field the dead and dying
are heaped high now in the
mud.
They, who have
paid for your lying,
who have paid for it with their blood.
Who gathered here just hours
ago,
just hours ago
this day.
And how could
they ever know
it would
end like this, end this way?
Who fell for you charm, fell
for your lies,
fell
here upon this brutal field.
Now only their despairing cries,
their senseless sacrifice
revealed.
Who fought in the rain, died in the rain,
common man and nobility,
never to see their
wives again,
an act of
heroic futility
II
And as if this dreadful sight
was not enough, as if
this wouldn’t do,
the
carnage went on through the night,
before butcher Cumberland was through.
Wounded, bayonted where they
lay,
their screams a
torment to the very air.
For the redcoats merely ‘orders of the day’,
but they knew, they
knew it wasn’t fair.
And to the villages the killers came
in a frenzy, in a savage
slaughter,
women,
children, cruelly slain,
a mother, son, a daughter.
And in this destruction ,in
this vile night,
your
absurd creation was born,
so today on plates and mugs might
we see your romantic image
adorned.
On tartan towels, on shortbread tins
and all along the whisky
trails,
your legend
filters down the glens,
a fruity blend of unlikely tales.
III
But on Culloden the blood will
never dry,
it runs
bright red, it soaks the ground.
And, at night, they say, you’ll hear a cry,
a far off, unearthly
sound.
At midnight, maybe, will you recoil
from an icy wailing, cold and
shrill,
for, though,
now buried deep in soil,
their spirits roam the moor still.
Roam the moor still, clansman
and chief,
who,
believing in you, could not know,
as well as pretender, you were a thief
sent to rob them of their
souls.
And for them today is ‘forty-six’,
never can they leave this
field,
it will never be
right, never be fixed,
the wounds will never be healed.
Again they curse Cumberland,
again,
-his black deeds
still they recall -
but
remembering, now, the mud and the rain,
curse you, bonnie prince, most of all.
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