EDWIN Morgan, Scotland's first official national poet (and a distinguished teacher at Glasgow University) has been featured in the city's current Aye Write!

book festival. Here he muses with candour about his mother and about his upbringing. (From his Collected Poems, Carcanet, £14.95 paperback.)

THE COALS

Before my mother's hysterectomy

she cried, and told me she must never bring

coals in from the cellar outside the house,

someone must do it for her. The thing itself

I knew was nothing, it was the thought

of that dependence. Her tears shocked me

like a blow. As once she had been taught,

I was taught self-reliance, discipline,

which is both good and bad. You get things done,

you feel you keep the waste and darkness back

by acts and acts and acts and acts and acts,

bridling if someone tells you this is vain,

learning at last in pain. Hardest of all

is to forgive yourself for things undone,

guilt that can poison life - away with it,

you say, and it is loath to go away.

I learned both love and joy in a hard school

and treasure them like the fierce salvage of

some wreck that has been built to look like stone

and stand, though it did not, a thousand years.