In Memoriam, Manjusvara Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.Last Supper

That Monday, swallows
Scissored the threads of evening
The sun lay warm on the wall.
He suppered with friends
A poem sweet on his speech
Talked with his hands as usual
As if sifting semi-quavers
Or drawing a woman of mist

A thunderclap of an eagle
Gate crashed the gathering
Opened its terrible talons
Bore him off in a blink

No time to pack
Friends, books, all left behind,
Travelling beyond
The phrase
The word
The breath

2.Green Tara’s Son: Tune The Parting Glass

There was a man went to the north
Walked merry under the nesting eaves
Brown frogs were hatching in the pond
The evening, crowned by laurel leaves

And there was summer all around
And peace of the low humming kind
With bird and beast he was at ease
And he was dark and quick of mind

But there appeared silver trout
That sprang from some forgotten well
And took him in its shining mouth
Beyond the sound of bird or bell

And where green Tara’s son had gone
The rising moon she would not say
The ferns bowed down a little while
The lochan’s waves rolled clean away


3.A Different Midwife

What you love most
The gods will take away
They took his hearing first
The door to music closing, inch by inch
His friend sat with him at the hospital
As is the way at childbirth
But this was leaving.

Drips descended tubes
The brain turned traitor
Anointed itself with blood

Replacing the hearing aids
The friend said mantras
Held the slack hand in his firm one

That final push
Requires a different midwife

4.Impermanence

Woods close ranks. The towns are scything nearer
Star shine, light years dead, illuminates
Ghetto moorlands, enclaves of harebells
Diminishing islands of meadows

The death watch beetle nibbles at the heart of oaks
Maypole ribbons are held by dancing skeletons
Corpses pour their features into flowers

From the alarming heavens, angels daily plunge into extinction
Like drugged flies, dropping past oblivious office windows

Along the Nile, Arabs play backgammon,
Their curls like liquorice swirls on sticky brows
Each self will burst like bubbles
Boiling up in the hubba bubba pipe

The searing sun falls from the scorching skies
Bleaches the shifting sands of human bones
Crushed by the might of mountains
Doomed to crack and shudder into stones

5.The Bird Man in the Willow

The bird man in the willow
Looks down from his mossy perch

His tune is the flute sob
His breath is as reed bamboo

Agile’s a mountain goat
He nests outside of the box
A moon-watcher
A skimmer of lakes
Courting the full attention
Of wren and chaffinch

6.Keening

Under the porch of the kirk
The step is spattered with droppings
Seven fledglings cheep in a nest
The birds claim sanctuary by right of breeding

The mother swoops with food
Seven mouths like stars ajar
A hungry generation and all need feeding

In the long grass a pocket of skin
Has emptied out its bones
A tiny hatchling, its hold on the earth receding

I think of the sons of egg, drunk by the crow
Of fox’s furtive visits
Of feathers, splayed and bleeding

The loss of youth upsets the natural order
Only the old should die. They are ripe for gleaning

7.Change

Change is the face of a child hard-slapped
Genocide ovens where people bake
The crack of a twig with its resin sapped

Change is the chime of a bell soft-tapped
The hangman’s noose & the burning stake
Rain forest deaths with their routes unmapped

Change is Winter, when lips are chapped
The blackboard sky and the chalky flake
When to survive all things adapt

Change is a man in irons strapped
A juggernaut making a city shake
A rearing boat with its rudder snapped

Change is cream by a kitten lapped
The churned mud round a trampled lake
Change is a mountain, glacier capped

Change is a lone performance, clapped
Raising the hood of the ego-snake
A racing horse with the bit unstrapped

Change is a stone that’s ivy-wrapped
Grass that can cause cement to break
Change is a corpse that’s carrion-flapped
A stag’s bright eye that’s maggot-cake