English Poems From Stilts Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Falling down
In Rome, the ruins of the Ancients
Still impress: marble columns, temples
Stand in the dust of centuries

In Britain, jerry-built houses
Trashy ephemera of the moment
Are swept aside for railways,
Aeroplane runways
Supermarkets
Their rusting ribs, buckle like
Legs with rickets

At the rubble by their feet
Squashed beer cans roll like bricks
Toppled from edifices like plastic blancmange
Unedifying, rotting away like waste


Goods and Chattels
What raised these following objects
To the status of precious goods?
Why do they stay like shadows
In my subconscious woods?

A scarab beetle, a signet ring
A cameo necklace, a berry making pan
A Zulu knobkerrie, a Victorian chamber pot
A shiny ivory elephant from Ceylon

A Reader's Digest book, a Victorian candle holder
A cd of Edith Piaf, a champagne cooler
A hearth where flames don't leap, they coldly smoulder

These are images tucked away in memory
After the dead who left them entered eternity


When you were born
You were a new song on sheet music paper
The manifestation of hope
You were Hogmanay when the bells ring
You were wished for as a spring hare
You were the silver sixpence in the dumpling
You were eyes with the cataracts removed
You were a clarion call in a silent day
You were an open window, letting happiness in
A skiff with new waves lapping

In the Chinese year of the rabbit you were
A Libra, born in the season of falling leaves
And the coming of migrant geese
And the golden leafed chestnut trees

What a gift you were on a Saturday afternoon!
Swaddled in hospital whites and crying lusty!


Playground
Mr Tumble, babble, bogies
Do-ray-me, bums, boo hoo hoo
Mt Wolf creeps up behind you
Nosey Parker sun peeps through

Can I, can I take your toy?
If I break it will you cry?

Bouncy bouncy ball is bouncing
No no no- you're NOT my friend
Screaming stamping in the corner
Going home now- that's the END


On this Day,7th July
In America, the conspirators who tried to assassinate Lincoln
Are hanged, swing 10 feet tall

In London, terrorist bombs
Kill 52 and injure 700

In Queenston, Ontario. Canada
15 die in an overloaded train

In India, flash floods sweep a bus into the river
78 passengers drown

In Lithuania, Nazis execute 5,000 Jews

Hanging, drowning, bombing, accident
So many ways to exit life too early
And not one is less cruel to those left behind
And none can be erased or blotted out
In Aberdeen, I open the door to the flat of my eldest son
Come face to face with death
I grieve for his life not lived


Stale pickings
In my prime, my body
Was a smorgasbord of treats

Over three decades now,
My skin, unsampled, has shrivelled

My ribcage, has become
That of a plucked chicken
Too old to savour
Beginning to smell of rot
Over three decades now,
I've walked, I've slept, I've talked
Any automaton could do as much

My nipples, like cherries,
Wrinkled on the stem

My lips, once wet as melon slices
Have dried to a thin pursed line

My quim, forbidden quince
Has forgotten the path to paradise

Almost half a life, a garden
Dying of drought


Music in a Scots Town House
The sacred and domestic intertwined
My brother's organ music sharing space
With Kerr's cornkisters, rural family roots

Tick tock, tick, the metronome tapped out
The background to the scales & arpeggios

The fine-tuned piano itself was very liberal
Its keyboard gave it up for Beethoven,
The Hens' March tae the Midden
Madam Butterfly

Tick tock, tick, the metronome tapped out
The background to the scales & arpeggios

The zither and the mandolin were maternal
From mother's days in the thirties,
In a minstrel band, her scores a mix of Yankee
And country dance

Tick tock, tick, the metronome tapped out
The background to the scales & arpeggios

Father had his voice: pitch perfect ear
A tenor who could make a stone wall weep,
In the Scottish fashion. He could whistle, too
And yodel like a goatherd in the Alps

The collective music experience of home
Was wide ranging, split into fragments
By personal histories, by differing allegiances

Tick tock, tick, the metronome tapped out
The background to the scales & arpeggios

I connected with my father, grandmother
Their music a gift from generation and culture

My brother crossed the Rubicon of class, of education
Into the trained refinements of Bartok & Britten


Chirpy Cheep Cheep
Have you ever considered the building habits of birds?
Our bulldog ramstam woodpecker chipping a cave in a tree
The African weaver-bird, building a tear drop from grass
Like a wild bee's hive suspended without the bees
Our resident house martin potters, making their homes of clay
And the Australian bower bird who constructs a shrine to love
Two walls of sticks or reeds bend gracefully to each other
Festooned with objects to please the beloved's eye

If a birds could speak to humans
The crow could expound on the development of the egg
The owl might rail at the illegality of egg theft
Breaking the Protection of Birds Acts of 1954
The nightingale could echo John Clare
Bewailing the land enclosure acts,
That started the stripping away of meadow and flowers
Ripping apart the fabric of nature's diverse tapestry