“I like your hat”

To introduce you to the poet, chidlren’s author and playwright Magi Gibson, I will use an excerpt from the back cover of her poetry book “I Like Your Hat” published in 2020 – Magi Gibson is a leading voice in Scottish poetry. She draws inferences from the little things in life (shopping for stationary, admiring a stranger’s hat, drinking tea with a friend) that affect the big issues in all our lives – growing older, poverty, and loss. It was hard to select just one poem but I will settle today for the one that gives her collection its title. I hope it will remind you and me of our common humanity, something so many in our present world often dismiss completely.

I Like Your Hat
At the bus stop where the wind’s trying
to kill us, slicing in like a scimitar from Siberia,
a tiny woman is wearing a colourful velvet beret.

She’s so small, I see each segment of its circle
sitting on her head like the wheel
of a stained glass window: emerald, sapphire,

saffron, indigo, amber, red. She beams
when I say it’s beautiful, tells me its story;
a gift from her daughter years ago,

she deemed it too bright, too loud,
stuffed it in a drawer, out of sight.
And now, her daughter’s dead.

Years later, the bus stop on St Vincent Street,
maybe it’s the same wind, slicing in
from Siberia, snow and ice spitting

through its sharpened teeth,
a young woman says, ‘I love your hat!’
It’s a beret of sorts. Mulberry wool.

‘Well cool,’ she says. ‘Unusual.’
‘It’s from a charity shop,’ I reply.
Then she admires my scarf. Hand-woven
in India. Fairtrade. And while the bus

doesn’t come, we talk recycling, pollution,
climate change, and I see she’s carrying
an art portfolio under one arm, while

on her shoulders she bears the future
of the world. And I swear her smile’s
so beautiful, this student girl

I’ve never met before, she’s lighting up
the shelter like an angel in a holy grotto
as all around the drear November dusk

descends black as the wings of ravens.
And the glow from her face warms me
more than my woollen kind-of-beret

or my hand-woven Fairtrade scarf or best
thermal underwear from Marks & Spencer,
or my specially lined duvet coat as worn

by explorers to far Antarctica
guaranteed to keep me warm at minus fifty
in a hurricane. And as we chat I recall

the tiny lady’s velvet beret, its jewelled
wheel of colours, and her sadness as she said
she wore it now to please her daughter,

who is dead. And all the while the darkness
deepens as if the sky is leaking sin
and the east wind with its icy breath

from Siberia does its best to kill us
and cut like a scimitar
through the warmth

of our common humanity. Magi Gibson

Prayer:
Lord God,
We make life and living so complicated.
Ambition, importance, power and self-regard,
have clouded the vision of our hearts and robbed
our eyes from seeing others as people like ourselves.
Forgive us for all our foolishness, pardon our selfish propensity.
Renew in us a grateful heart for life itself,
restore in us a warm welcoming smile to friend and stranger and
remind us that we share a common humanity on this
shared planet
we call
home.
Amen.