Neil Young
Neil Young hails from west Belfast (1964 batch) and now lives in north-east Scotland. He worked as a labourer, kitchen-porter, stage-hand, barman and studied drama before becoming a journalist. Neil’s publications include Lagan Voices (Scryfa, 2011), The Parting Glass – 14 Sonnets (Tapsalteerie, 2016), Jimmy Cagney’s Long-Lost Kid Half-Brother (Black Light Engine Room, 2017), Shrapnel (Poetry Salzburg, 2019), and After the Riot (Nine Pens, 2021). In 2014, he founded The Poets’ Republic magazine as a forum for radical non-conformist poetry, and it has continued to showcase poets in English, Scots, Gaelic, and other languages, in print, online and at festival events. In 2020, he co-founded Drunk Muse Press alongside poet-editors Hugh McMillan and Jessamine O’Connor, and the press has now published books by a diversity of poets from across Scotland and internationally. Neil staged the first Wee Gaitherin festival in Stonehaven in August 2021 to coincide with the lifting of lockdown restrictions; the festival has since expanded under the guidance of fellow directors Lesley Benzie, Cait O’Neill McCullagh and Hugh McMillan, and now operates as a charity. He is currently working on a new collection of poems, Last Man Not Standing; and a screenplay/radio drama, Saturday Afternoons at the Rockadoo.
The City in Time
Neil Young
Maybe you thought in spite of yourself
that someone would recognise you
when you leaned at the bar
And set you up a whiskey
as if you’d just stepped out
then strolled in thirty years later;
Or maybe the road to school you walked
as if its pavements were contoured to your sole
would feel the same again underfoot.
The goalposts at the park
would never rust; the Italian
cafe and record shop wouldn't shut;
the river would gleam the same
in its ghostlight and the pathway
stagger unbroken to the docks.
Maybe you thought if you stood
and looked for long enough you’d catch
your mother’s silhouette
as she ran for the car,
the folk across the street would still live there
and people would say: “This is where you belong,
you have to stay. To live and love and work.”
But nothing is ever the same
when you go back. You are not known,
the streets are not your own
and everyone’s accent is a foreign tongue
Because the city in time
only lives in you
and when you go
you take what it was
like a final print
And after that it’s always
only a city you left.