English Poems From Number6 Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Number 6
Number 1 was involved in the Suffrage movement
A Perthshire girl, she worked in Lincoln
Superintendent in a psychiatric hospital
Dr Myra Mackenzie, died at the age of eighty
A very healthy specimen of woman

Number 2 was Jeannie Charlotte Macleod
Born in Edinburgh, schooled in Aberdeen
A product ofthe Aberdeen High School for Girls
One week after working as a doctor,
Jeannie killed herself, a loss to medicine

Number 3 was Margaret Duncan from Turriff
House surgeon at a children's hospital, Sheffield
One day after her first child was born
She died, aged 27, of ‘Cardiac Failure'

Number 4, Isabella Gunn of Fochabers,
Married a Methodist missionary
Travelled to Dichpali in India
Set up a leprosy hospital, served it well
Died of pneumonia in 1932

Number 5 was Isabel Copland Smith
She was an M.O. in London,
Worked in infant welfare and maternity
Died aged 70, her night dress burned

Number 6 was Catherine Anderson of Ceylon
From Junior House Surgeon in Britain
To M.O. in Ceylon, lecturer in children's diseases
Trained in tropical illness, FRCS from Edinburgh
In WW1 she served in Salonika, in Corsica
And finally served herself, goodbye to cancer
From ship to sea, closing the final chapter of her life
Matter of fact, like stepping out from her clothes


Sri Lankan Welcome
When you step off the plane at Colombo
The heat hits you full in the face like a punch

The taxi driver tells you in graphic detail
Of death by Tuk Tuk, the region's three wheeled gnat

Ignore him. Prepare to be astonished and delighted,
This is the beautiful tear drop, hanging from India's lobe
This is Ceylon of the tea fields, most delicate tea on the globe


In-Bred
I come from a tribe of in- breds
Cousins and second cousins intermarried
This was our norm; my father was kin to my mother
My uncle was kin to his wife. Cousins wed cousins
You knew what you were getting with a relative

I was into my teens when I learned the shocking fact
Most people married strangers
Horror of horrors,
Some even wed out-with the North East pool!
I opted not to cast my net too wide
I chose a Deeside man, dark like my father
Of farming stock, who handled a gun like my kindred
A Doric speaker, too.Like a herd of pedigree cows, we knew our lineage
Stamped by the common brand of heritage


For Morven,2 years dead
Athletic, headstrong, handsome and a rebel
How I regret the many things unsaid;
No parent ever should outlive their offspring;
Rotting away, I live, while you are dead.

The places where we went are still as busy,
Today I drop my gaze, I quickly pass
To walk the streets you walked is still as painful,
As treading barefoot over broken glass.

If there was any way to change position,
To raise you from Death's desolate domain
I'd bargain with the Devil in a heartbeat
Dear child of mine, so you might live again

Oshawa
Over thesteel-grey ocean,
Home of the wolfand bear,
Scotland's lost children scatter
Round the forests and Great Lakes there;
Gone from the glen and village
Each carries a favourite scene
A frozen memory of homeland
Where the birks are ever green.
Do they live up to expectations
These stormy, New World coasts?
When folk die, in the wide diaspora
Does Scotland reclaim their ghosts?


Passengers
Road-killed stags in the boot, ready for gralloching
Wartime Canadian lumberjacks in the boot,
(When the bus was full, with the lure of a local dance)

Climbers, hikers, skiers, farmers, families
Loaf to Crathie, mince to Braemar, coffins
Whisky, poachers, a man with a glass eye

Lovers, drunks, the driver always waited for his regulars
The buses ran to irregular hours, to suit the public need
And to Hell with the fixed bureaucracy of timetables


Typhoid Summer
Oh we were the rabid dogs,
The lepers, the black plague bearers
The sewer rats, the bogey-men
Thank God for our NHS carers

Quarantine, health prison, strict incarceration
Delirium, moaning, the system under stress
Companies ruined, town treated as a pariah
Citizens panicked, a symptom of distress

Milk left on the bottom step
The family business wrecked
And testing, testing, testing
Inspect, inspect, inspect

That summer the city suffered
Till all was over, Amen!
And after, return to normal
Milk on the top step then


Death of a Career
This was the year the city dissolved around me
The snow-white horse of hope went to the abattoir
The forest of the future shrivelled and curled
Like an old hag's nails, post mortem, black and charred

This was the year the house of cards collapsed
A lizard crawled away with the Ace ofHearts
Centre stage, the joker split his sides

Limping away, the might-have-beens, the maybes
A chandelierdwindled down to a candle stub
This was the year my life dissolved around me
My useless hands like talentless lumps of meat
The career was a long time in dying
Whimpering in a corner, a beaten cur


Shadow Memory
Stumbling along the corridors of memory,
I recall little. He is an absence, a family ikon
Exchanging English-Scots for Portuguese

His neighbours weren't afraid to use their guns
Shot dead intruders creeping in from favelas
To relieve them of their luxuries and comforts
The police, it seems, could be bribed not to inquire

Was Scotland too challenging? Limiting? Too confining?
A couple of postcards a year, a phone call at the Bells
Didn't cut the mustard when it counted
It's hard to miss a shadow that lay so lightly


The Sunflowers (Ross Clinic 1960s)
If you stare long enough at a painting of Van Gogh's sunflowers
The heads turn into a pride of lions with fiery manes
Or Catherine wheels whirring in break neck agony
cc-crack, cc-crack, cc-crack

They are all consuming suns
Swallowing galaxies of onlookers

They are venomous sea anemones
They are explosions of pus

All are cut off from the living
Dying in their yellow beauty
Their petals like loose teeth rattling in a painted skull

Image, and the power of the image
Like a spark in a tinder box
Exploding within the mind's imagination


The Witches in the Wood
Watch the witches in the wood
In their cauldron mix a spell
Deadly nightshade, strangleweed
Devil's guts- the plant from hell

Hemlock, firethorn, dead horse arum
Corpse flower, ghost plant, doll's eye too
Monkshood, wolfsbane, belladonna
Blackthorn stirs the evil brew

Watch the witches in the wood
Keep as silent in the grave
If those creatures of the dark
Hear you, nothing can you save


Treasures Lost & Won
In the 60s father gave mother an eternity ring
To mark their years of marriage. In time came
A musquash fur, complete with pearls

The latest American trend to cross the Atlantic
Is the ‘push present', the reward for completing labour

Not a bunch of roses, a box of chocs
Kim Kardashian West's gift
Was a Lorraine Schwartz diamond choker
Kate Middleton, wife of Prince William,
Was given Kiki McDonough amethyst and diamond earrings

In India,7% of girls are married under 15
On the Nepalese border,8 year olds are wed
Girls under 15 are 5 times more likely to die
In the pains of childbirth

One 11 year old's body went into shock on her honeymoon
Requiring hospitalization, before being sent home

A Yemeni bride of 8, died of internal injuries
Received on her wedding night
After the pretty dress, the shiny trinkets,
Some sweets and candies
The horror and reality of rape in the defenceless dark
By a merciless adult in the full blown thrust of lust
A hidden treasure the world turned its back on