Douglas Scotney Poems

The cat couldn't sleep
for the smell of bodies
in the mist rolling in
from the graveyard
...

From Latin for laurel, lauris, is Laura,
but there are hints of an ear and dawn,
of gold and especially breeze:
auris et aurora, aurum et aura.
...

I posed to my stylist,
'I'll tell you what I want
then I'll shut my eyes
and tell you nothing more.
...

Hours after I'd resigned myself to watching the fireworks on TV
and seen the aftermath of the Iranian embassy bombing in Beirut,
blatant or surreal,
one shortened-sleep night,
...

It appears
in their efforts to clean out the lower spheres
know-it-alls
have unearthed high corruptions with the low.
...

I like to work myself up into a poetry lather of a morning
and wonder if I could always be on the beat.
I've lost the fear it mightn't come back,
as it seems to only recede.
...

As with breathing
so with superstition
a lack
causes their rise and fall...
...

She revealed to someone acquainted with death,
an artist of tropical skill,
'Everything I am
and know
...

At the top of a page in my dictionary are two words
in comparatively large type, averring,
'All words hereon lie between us'.
...

My laureateship, I here report,
was awarded, not first
for my work's literary merit,
but for its grave import.
...