Click here to watch a video of “14.6”, the final poem from my set at Speak Up!, the Loud Poets international women’s day event last month.

Be sure to check out the other videos from the evening that are going up on the Loud Poets YouTube channel. So far there are: Alice Tarbuck’s “Satanic Transformations”, RJ Hunter’s “The Grievance”, Georgia Bartlett-McNeil’s “When the Person You Love is a Gun”, Annie Rutherford’s “In which I am intimidated by a group of girls on a night out” and Jj Fadaka’s “The Other Mother”. I’m so looking forward to seeing which poem they choose to highlight from JL Williams’s set, which was a highlight in a night of highlights. There will also be a video of the whole reading at some point.

A wee bit of background on “14.6”

The title “14.6” comes from the date I was given my first HRT prescription, which marked the beginning in earnest of my medical transition. As I was quietly celebrating the first anniversary of that significant day and reflecting on the year that had passed, it occurred to me that there was a numerical conjunction with John 14.6, the verse in the Gospel where Jesus says:

I am the way, the truth and the life.

That seemed like an absolute gift of a coincidence, an invitation to reflect on the way that living out the truth of my transness had affected, and led to, life. An invitation to reflect on being trans and a person of faith. Those three concepts—way, truth, life—therefore became the presiding images of the poem and are woven throughout it directly and obliquely.

“14.6” is in Scots, apart from the final line, which is in Gaelic and means:

In whisky [is] the truth. This is the way.

The Gaelic for “whisky”—“uisge-beatha”—literally means “the water of life”, so that last line nods to all three of the presiding images.

The poem is the longest piece I’ve written in Scots yet, so it feels like an achievement on more than one level. I’m fair chuffed with this reading of it, too, even if I did for some reason pronounce “sleep” a wee bit oddly. Be sure to switch on the close captions if you want to follow the text.