Of Houses, Churches, Glens (38 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.House in Affleck Street

The house like an eaglet sits in its stone eyrie
A cloud on its head, a magpie in each ear.
A brown door catches its breath,
The harbour tang sneaks underneath
Over the welcome mat that's hardly worn.

Cool slates walk down the roof in study order
Like Japanese sardines
The hedge is a thrush's playpen.
Over the Zen tarmac, over the rat-run road
A JCB is straining at its gears
Wandering Willies pour through concrete cracks

A gull zips over a flyover.
A yellow oil ship slithers from the dock
A Virgin train is humming in its grooves.
Everything's leaving, Desperate to be off


2.St Machar's Gate, Evening, July

Confetti has drifted away from a bride's veil
Tissue bells roost on tombstones
Paper horseshoes gallop over grass.
Cathedral cross is a crow perch.

Down in the worm arena,
Rose petals tumble like aristocratic heads,
Culled in a bloody coup.

A yew forms stalactites that creep into the clouds
Razor wire protects religious glass
From smash and plunder.
Daisies close their doors,
Invisible clocks wind down,
Slackening jaws unhinge.

In woody quarters
Sycamore roots in time will drive their point
Straight through a flesher's eye.
A dog rose periscope rises from the mould
Sharpens its thorns on the air
A scissor-grinder whetted by the rain.


3.Old Aberdeen

A yew tree slides its shadow over stones,
Parishioners, like pews, have worn away.
A granite skeleton gives birth to bones.
Red leaves hang from knotty boughs, like rags.
A Moslem family walks towards the park.
Dead congregations fertilize the loam,


4.Cruickshank Gardens, Winter

Cold pond's a puckered mouth of wrinkled ice
Dead leaves are laminated to the grass
The Machar Bell clangs through the tinny air
A whining plane cuts circles in the sky

Dead leaves are laminated to the grass
Snipped bare, black dripping trees are candy-twisted
A whining plane cuts circles in the sky
Five snowdrops tremble delicate and chilled

Stripped bare, black dripping trees are candy-twisted
A sparrow scuds along on sturdy wings
Five snowdrops tremble, delicate and chilled
The snarl of traffic rushes like a sea

A sparrow scuds along on sturdy wings
Cold pond's a puckered mouth of wrinkled ice
The snarling traffic rushes like a sea
The Machar bell clangs through the tinny air.


5.Cruickshank Gardens, Summer

Crazy paving leads to a sunk Gethsemane.
A lily swings its polished pendulum.
Flowers are cutlery on a table of leprechaun green.

A poppy core, pungent as snuff
Has petals of crepe paper, an old man's skin.
A thrush is yodelling summer.

A bouncing tit tobaggans down a slope.
Water lilies glow like butter lights.
Deep in the pond, limp as liquorice, a black leech hangs,
An accordion looking for music.

Tadpoles canoodle in the hatching soup,
Newts swivel their tails like curved propellers.
A tiny frog goes blip, misses the mark by a leg.
Forget me nots, spectacularly blue,
Wear collars of Maypole green.

The sign says 'Do not walk upon the grass.'
The potting shed is dark with possibilities.


6.Bridge by a Housing Scheme

No-hopers are throwing stones,
Smack in the centre of the cold current.
The sky is grey as slop.

A fly is caught in a web,
A note stuck in the throat of a rotten harp.

Rust is slowly eating the spars of the bridge.
The slimey wooden slats splinter and rot.
Between their chinks, a slab of Autumn air
Lies on the leaden lid of the scummy waves.

A jogger pants towards a mugger's haven.
Behind a shed, boys picnic upon dope.
The wind rattles the ribs of a plastic bag.

A guard in a yellow jacket prowls his kingdom,
The throaty bark of his dog is fierce and raw.
One by one, the city lights come on,
Small Chinese lanterns wobbling on the water.


7.Brig o Balgownie
The bridge is almost exactly as it was in Byron's day,
when he terrified himself by thinking that
Thomas the Rhymer's prophecy applied specifically to himself

Six white feathers curl like question marks.
A woman un-pegs washing, flaps a sheet.
The river has its life, and she has hers.
She puts to flight a bobbing duckling fleet.

The bridge span is a stony bishop's mitre,
Over a troubled pool, as deep as doubt.
That arch has borne the weight of centuries,
Miller and wheelwright, jogger, roustabout.

Walkers inspect the livery of the town,
The leopard, castle, motto on the plaque.
Meanwhile the bridge stares resolutely down
Into its drowned self shimmering and black.

Gulls break from parting continents of clouds,
Breeze blears the slow, queer water's twisted face.
Driftwood snags reeds that tug downstream like hair
Grey scudding waves like fins of salmon, race.

A student's loud hulloo rings through the air.
A panting dog jigsaws towards a root.
A trout-leap is a wobbly up-tossed coin,
The crunch on sand is a lone walker's foot.

A leaf floats to the sucking, swaying sea.
The bank's a twist of serpent, woody braids.
A beetle stalls. An indecisive path.
Juggernauts growl on distant carriageways.

Those incandescent moons in lamp-lit trees,
Spill creamy cargo through the darkening leaves.
A heron finds a parking space to sit
Neighbourhood watch...how close he's watching it!


8.Zoo Building

Drawers of jaws and claws,
A mummified mausoleum.
A mortuary of owls, stuffed feathers, painted props.
Skulls, like jewellery, lie in a glass case.
Ivory skeleton hangs, a coral doll.

Butterflies are pinned down.
Each polished cage, a stitch up of dissections
Embryo fledglings float in formaldehyde
Like fruit preserves.

Hat stands of birds of paradise do not sing.
Hedgehog, dead as a foot scraper gathers dust.
A soup of polyps, swim in vinegary limbo.

A sperm whale swings in its chains.
A squirrel's seams are showing,
Its paws like flattened spiders.

Frozen Polar bears are fashion mannequins,
A winter haute couture of claw and cream.
A deer is wearing a coconut's dry coat,

A throttled adder hangs from a thin noose.
Only the tiger captivates, swashbuckling tiger
Sleek as a chaise long, bearing its head like a rajah
Only the tiger pads softly out like a thought,
Like a snowflake settling into the nest of my mind.

9.Pet shop Fish

Fish in a tank.
Furious gills
Like millwheels rearrange water


10.Housing Scheme Telecommunications Mast

Three violets, a twisted Twix wrapper, four haggis-pudding dog-turds
A seagull feather (singular, never in twos or fives)
Lie fanned out like a sundial's metal hours
From the giant mast.

The mast has a robot's intestines
A succession of welded toast-racks of grates and drains
Standing on four steel legs, it scrapes the sky
It jags against the eyes, ringed by Auschwitz-wire
(You almost expect the search-lights)
Covered with barnacle-dishes.

Its neighbours are mainly tower blocks.
A belch of smoke is rising like a pyre from somebody's car or garden
A plane's so low you feel you could touch and squash it like a fly.

It is dusk, and the ice cream bird is calling
Lean dogs chase stones across this urban waste.
It's cold. I pull my jacket close, and shiver.


11.Back Street on a Grey Day

Starlings lasso a sooty chimney stack
Clouds smoulder in the ash-tray of the sky
Leftovers wait in the street for seagull uplift.
A car squats in a lane.

On ageing pads a mongrel hobbles by,
Sniffs lamp posts of pee-gone-dry.
Blossom, like froth from a beer mug overspills
The cat on a windowsill's a yellow postcard
Stella Artois' been flattened by a boot.

Pigeons decide, then undecide, to fly
Phone wires swing with sparrows
A window is a spider web of cracks

From an open window, someone's singing
Evening will cover the sight
Of six dead flowers in a pot.


12.Bog

I am a child of the bog.
I am sphagnum, yellow as jester's bells,
I drink the dew from a thousand secret wells.

I am a child of the bog. I am the purple heath.
I am the royal road with the black, black bog beneath.

I am a child of the bog. A sleepy, scaley rope.
I am adder, the forked tongue that sleeps on the slope.

I am a child of the bog. I sting, I bite.
I am the tiny midge, cloud dancer, sharp and bright.

I am a child of the bog, the gossamer dragonfly.
My shimmering wings are mirrors that catch the sky.
I am a child of the bog. I am the slithering newt.
Here, is my alpha and omega. Here, I lay my fruit.

I am a child of the bog, the staring owl
My hood of feathers frames me like a cowl.

I am a child of the bog, the ancient otter,
Threading my fish-fuelled way through the land of water.

I am a child of the bog.
I have a crown of thorns
I am the stag.
I flee from hunting horns.

I am a child of the bog. I soar, I sigh,
I am the goose skimming the weeping sky.

I am a the mother of all. I am the yielding peat
I am birthing bed, and tomb, where all bog-creatures meet.


13 Tyrebagger Earth House

Entering the earth, one chink in the pitch-black roof
Lets sky stream through a musty shaft of light
Lets trapped clouds dance in the den.

The eye in this dark socket blearily fills with stars.
Creeping night is Lucifer, cast from his golden throne.
Fox could lie here in his hot red coat
His ribs like clarsach strings, thrumming a bloody tune.
Here, he could rest, lulled by the rustling spruce, the hush-a-bye beech
And watch fern wave its cockscomb crest at the den's mouth.

High in trees the raven rides the wind.
The owl with her bowl-shaped face scoops up a mouse.
From the great heraldic shield of wood and wind
An oak steps out in livery of green.


14 Late Evening, Loch Voile

The mist has swallowed the forest like a shark
Alders are elderly cailleachs,
Hunched beneath a wicker creel of reeds
A straying ewe bleats weakly

Clouds float overhead
The sky is weeping
Day's agendas drown.


15.Balquidder Blackie's perspective

Soft small rain sits lightly on my back
Like glisten on an umbrella
I am a cloud creature
My world is wind and wet.

I swoop beneath the leafy see-saw beech.
My toes are thin forked twigs
That I bounce up from.
My tiny retina's an eclipsed moon
I am familiar with stars as trees I shall not visit.

When I open my beak to pour the music out
I fill an empty moment up with song
The echo from the glen tells I'm alive.

Down by the path I hear the huge gate click
I bolt for the sky's embrace
Retreat into the air.
Within its silence, its acceptance
All that's me will shrink
Into a dot.


16.Shrine Room in a Glen

Meditators enter the holiness of silence
Where the heart in its red nest
Drums its no-sound lullaby
Shushing the birds of worry
Into rest.

Eyelids dropp like leaves
Signs and visions ripple behind lashes.
The room is still, is cool with quiet breathing
Bliss shines in copper bowls
Mist-thoughts rise,
Dissolve and float away.

Two clogs, four boots, six sandals
Sit at the shrine door, vessels filling with thrums
Of morning's noise.
Mountains bleat. Nettles squeak.
Rhododendrons cheep.
A green pool parps and hums.


17.Evening, Dhanakosa, Balquidder

I walk in silence, parting long green grass
A bird sings in a tree in the high wood
The grass closes. My footsteps disappear.
Oak is a great cathedral, a moving ikon.

A bird sings in a tree in the high wood
A cloud drifts like a swan across the sun.
Oak is a great cathedral, a moving ikon
In shadow, secret insects swarm and hum.

A cloud drifts like a swan across the sun.
The wind smudges the glass of the still loch
In shadow secret insects swarm and hum.
A leaping trout hangs like a silver scythe.

The wind smudges the glass of the still loch
I walk in silence, parting long green grass
A leaping trout hangs like a silver scythe.
The grass closes. My footsteps disappear.


18.The Sidmouth Festival tune: The Lincolnshire Poacher

When I came down to Sidmouth town, it was a marathon
I sat on a train, a bus, a plane and a ten mile traffic jam

Chorus: And what's to do on the Devon coast? I asked the folks about
Oh go down the quay to watch the sea and the tide go in and out.

I sat me down on an English lawn some carolling for to hear
Through the hullabaloo a Frisbee flew and I nearly lost an ear
They sang a song of a famous ram with horns that reach the sky
But an English lamb can fit in a pram so I knew that for a lie

Folk come in droves they're peculiar coves with beards and hairy legs
They lie on the grass both lad and lass a-drainin cider kegs
You can rattle your can or your old bodhran or whistle and stamp your clog But you'll need to carry a plastic bag if you exercise your dog

So here's to the Morris dancing men all wreathed in bells and smiles
No need to ask where their venue is you'll hear them coming for miles
Oh I'll go back to my Scottish kin and I'll take them by the hand
On English ground no midge's found it is the Promised Land.


19.Den

A fir-branch wigwam, smelling of pine and green,
The den was a hideaway, a shadow wrap-around.
Through chinks of childhood,
I watched a hoodie crow
Peck the eyes from a still-born lamb in the field.
Its cold caw spelt out needs that were legitimate


20.E-mails in Purgatory

Good afternoon sir. Can I help you?
Half an hour you've tried to call?
I'm a typist not a robot.
Just be glad you're through at all!

You were passed to Bob in Finance?
No excuse for being gruff!
You're the man who sorts the plumbing?
Heavens! Now I've cut you off.

Karen's invoices are ruined?
Why's it always ME they blame?
Over every sender's name.

Mr Khan in Abu Dhabi lodged complaints with our HQ,
When I faxed him Nigel's time sheets, destined for Rosheen in Crewe.

Where's I.T.? My screen is empty.
This computer's crashed, quite gone.
Thank you Kieren for observing that I'd never switched it on.

Why is Matthew so crestfallen? No one said his favourite mug
Was the one I broke on Friday... Tell him he can use the jug.

No I don't shout down the pager.
No I didn't deafen Joan.
She's off sick because I stapled
Her left finger to the phone.

Now the photocopier's grounded.
Clean it Phyllis ordered me.
Am I psychic? Who'd think Brillo ruined new technology?

Urgent e-mails all have vanished into files I never raised!
Logging off time. Halleluja.
Homeward bound, the Lord be praised


21.The Lady of the Loch

The way to the loch is hidden by starts and stoppings,
By blink-bright sun.
By a blackbird's chirps and hoppings.

The lady of the loch is not for knowing,
Though her skirts are full and her petticoats are showing.

Don't be conned by the flash of a lacy frill,
For the heart of the lady's black...it's rot gut still.
The blood that runs in her veins is cut throat chill.

Aeons crumble to must in her in her murky bed,
Though the moon's her pillow and stars shine round her head.


22.The Big Round Moon

Last night the big round moon walked down to the loch
Carrying stars to dropp into the dark nest of my heart.
Today in the rattle tin of the train's motion,
They tap against my ribs, eager to tumble out
Eager to shine once more before my eyes.


23. Time the File

Time wears you down to dust.
Ideals enter ancestral vaults.
Hope sips a double brandy, packs and flits.

One day a postcard will come, addressed to you from the past
In your own hand, and you won't even know it.

Time wears you down to dust.
The winds of change will blow it.


24.Conjugal Manoeuvres

After I was born.
Conjugal manoeuvres ceased
Dad should have fired blanks.


25. Marks and Spencers as an Insect Fetish

This morning during meditation
A cabbage white butterfly flew in.

Not cuffed away, it settled on a shirt
Sipped strange pollen, male deodorant
Pretended to be a tiepin, then flew off.


26. Kidney Bean Child

Stars stare from hollow sockets.
Moon wears a sad face,
Like a woman I knew once,
Far to the North of Kindness

In a withered time and place.
When we finally parted,
Frost sat where tears should have shone.

I had rolled from her womb like a kidney bean
Gathering dust and grudges.
Dry as an old bone.


27.Mind Poem

In the lenses of the mind, thoughts are cloudy or refined
Blurred or skewed, enlarged or small.
Microscopic. Ten feet tall!

Through its landscape, when disturbed,
Prowling tigers can't be curbed.
Sun drips blood and devils prate.
Here, breeds sorrow. Here, breeds hate.
Here, no hunger after fame,
Wealth nor love nor high acclaim
Brings the calm that wise men find.
The priceless jewel. A quiet mind.


28. Stalker

Death, like a cat, is stalking one of our number.
He flicks his tail, he crooks his yellow paws.
His widening maw's where all hopes come asunder,
Flesh turns to bone in the teeth of his grave jaws.

Some of his kills are sudden as a hanging,
A trap door fall from this world to the next.
Sometimes the door's ajar, he's softly tapping,
His calling card is elegant mourning text.

Hiss puss, there's plenty pickings! Choose another!
Choose hang-dog Jade, or dreary, prattling Finn!
Choose snuffling John.
Choose Jenny's half-wit brother Draw back your claws.
Choose anyone but him.


29.Scottish-English

English bounds like a puppy
Wearing a tartan collar


30.The Monologue of the Burn

Drip slip dripple drapple
Lit split lit split
Splat stars trippy tars
Splat stars trippy tars
Linn spin linn spin
Liddleplump liddleplump
Plupple plupple plupple
Blub blub blub blub
Whimple whumple whump whoop
Whoosh


31.A Ferry of Poems has docked at Blaikie's Quay

Some poems travel steerage,
Others are first class.
Some halloo from the deck,
Waving a red silk hanky.
Some run up the mast,
In strictly semaphore order.
Some jump in the Duty Free
Waving spotty knickers
And red fridge magnets

I am the captain
I encourage stowaways
Slipping aboard at midnight
I never closely study their credentials
Grateful, when my table's full of guests,
Taking my mind off storms,
The attentions of sharks.


32. Seagulls

Beneath their creamy breasts,
Seagulls tuck their legs like resting oars,
Sky-high tea cosies, beaks split in eggy smiles.
Fleets of them anchor on roofs
Warming their feathery bums.
Points of the compass
They slip-stream air,
Cliff skimmers, cloud swimmers, screechers,
Waddlers on divers' flippers.


33.Barking Dog Haiku

Thought's a barking dog.
Today my mind is tethered,
Chasing its own tail.


34. Can of Worms

The can of worms held its secret for 50 years.
One day the tin rusted,
Out flew a May-fly brother wonderful as Troy.
Who'd ever have thought
We'd stewed in the same juice!


35. Portrait of Self as a Dead Bat.

Look at the bat on the sofa!
Dead, by its own misogyny.
Its claws are cut to the quick.

It used to plan an itinerary, then stay home,
Make a few turns of the ceiling,
Watch the stars through glass.

Now, its wings are packed like an old umbrella
Left over from somebody's funeral.

Its tin tack eyes are wide,
But sightless, sightless,
An old bat there on the sofa,
Still as a doll that nobody really wanted.


36. Bird in a Dark Room

No-one ever told it the hunter'd been dead for years.
A fresh world turned on its axle,
A new sun shone,

So it continued to flutter its wings
Down behind a press in terrible darkness.
No-one got close enough to clean its wounds,
Too raw for tenderness, too sore for touch

And so the bird, Despair could not move on
Out through the open door
Up to the sky where swallows swooped in joy.


37. A Scottish Cashier's Fantasy

Oh Sikh with black moustaches, and turban gold and red,
You'd make a lovely parcel to unwrap in some bed.

Not mine, of course. My boyfriend works with Lloyd's TSB,
But- purely out of interest- what do you think of me?

I'm on the Atkins diet. I'm on the pill as well.
My salary is rising. I'm solvent. Can you tell?

My hair is layered and tinted. Flight's called!
I've got to go!
Now, Sikh with black moustaches, we'll never ever know.


38. Bangkok Get-abouts

Buddhist monk in saffron robes and trainers
Cycles past, his air-waves plugged into peace,
Overtaken by a Bangkok tuk-tuk

Three speed trip:
Turn right, turn left, turn over.

Elephant squashes a carry-out,
Sways out behind a street of open shops
Sucks pollution up like a vacuum
Sashaying heavily into a dead end.