Of John Lennon, Killing Fields, Turkey Etc (11 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.Along the Turkish Coast

At any time the wind may change,
The Sea’s low monotone become a wolfish roar.
The ocean’s a stockbroker shuffling shares on the beach
Salt is at a premium, sands are slipping
Driftwood and coral, the tig and tag of foam
Turn everything over and over on the shore

The ocean’s an elephant, forgetting nothing
Ancient Kaunos, the Roman Empire slavers,
Clip-curled Greeks worshipping Artemis,
To-ing and fro-ing of jasmine, silver, gold
Suleyman the Magnificent’s warrior tide
Nelson on his journey to the Nile
Hollywood’s African Queen, an aberration
Bursting out of the reeds, an oily terrapin

What to salvage from this, the ancient tombs,
The temples, studding the Turquoise Coast, like teeth?
The Dalyan river decants into the sea through beds of reeds
Leaving marshes behind in breezy pools
Where the wind’s an Arab playboy racing through the rushes

Cotton fields and grasses echo aloud to the cry
Of storks and herons heading for scrub-clad dunes
Mosquitoes fizz and swarm, a malarial soup
Dragonflies skim the fine white shelving sands
Like flying brooches

Along the bay of Marmaris
Yachts in their white marinas
Rock like lullabies under the sickle sun.


2.Paul the Psychic Octopus

Who can foretell momentous times?
For football teams with little fuss
Not Nostradamus, Mystic Meg,
But Paul the Psychic Octopus

His tentacles, like pentacles
Attune to vibes we cannot suss
Will Harry ever rule the realm?
Ask Paul, the Psychic Octopus

And yet, this oceanic blob
For prestige, doesn’t give a cuss
‘Just keep me off the menu, please’
Says Paul, the Psychic Octopus


3. The Cost of Grief, Bengal

For wailing only...one rupee
Wailing, rolling on the ground...five rupees
Wailing, rolling on the ground
And beating one’s head...five rupees, two sikkas
Wailing, beating one’s breast
Following the corpse to the pyre,
Rolling on the ground there....six rupees
Also, some dal, salt, oil
A little rice
And praises will be sung to all the kin


4. À la Byron

Four young Turks from Norway
Share a hubba bubba pipe
Hubble bubble moment
Wee treat, but monster hype


5.The Hand of god
After the painting Rabbi with Cat: by Natalya Goncharova

Oh look! There’s the hand of god
Pointing, like a traffic sign from the sky

Not saving two Jews
Fleeing a pogrom

Not stopping a pogrom
Chasing two Jews

Just pointing, at the Rabbi holding the cat
Maybe god thinks it’s rude to interfere


6.The Exquisite Corpse
After the drawing, the Cadavre Exquis by André Breton

Leaves lie on the skull of the exquisite corpse
Like the hair on a Grecian statue

A worm is slowly turning the brain to mulch
The corpse is bearded
Its moustache is the steam of an engine
That roars from its dark throat

Its shoulder-blade’s a sea-saw
Holding a tilting balance

The anvil of its heart, no longer
throbs to the pulse’s rhythmic hammer

The dry funnel of its stomach
Vanishes into a pair of grimy long johns

A testicle hangs by a thread
Like a monocle dropped from an eye
The corpse is losing its manhood
Descending down the scrotum into the tomb

7.The Killing Fields

Bones mark the killing fields. A land of Night
Walk lightly here and do not turn away
Pol Pot made every evil act seem right

Khmer Rouge brought a strange and wicked blight
Plunging their country into anarchy
Bones mark the killing fields, a land of Night

Year Zero rang the death knell of the bright
Townsfolk, professionals, all led away
Pol Pot made every evil act seem right

Children and women skewered in frantic flight
‘Depositees’ mass murdered in the clay
Bones mark the killing fields. A land of Night

Atrocities were honey to his sight
Cambodian Hitler’s warped insanity
Pol Pot made every evil act seem right

With Brother No One’s power at its height
No use to beg, to plead, confess or pray
Bones mark the killing fields. A land of Night
Pol Pot made every evil act seem, right.


8.John Lennon & Yoko Ono: The Final Picture
Inspired by the photograph by Annie Liebovitz, taken 5 hours before Lennon was shot by Mark Chapman

Dear John
I am revisiting your double fantasy:
That all you need is love
That man can be free as a bird

Do you want to know a secret?
You were living on borrowed time
You should have known better
Stepping out into the instant karma
Of meeting a nowhere man who thought
That happiness was a warm gun
No time to run for your life

Rock n’ Roll people set themselves up
For scumbags, crippled inside, who fish for shadows
Whose mind games link dead heroes with instant Fame

Before the season of glass in New York City
You were walking on thin ice, you and
Your wife, with her long black hair splayed out
Like widow’s weeds, her eyes inscrutable, an ocean child
The Imperial blood of Japan in her see-through veins

Your woman, fully clothed in black and blue
And you, bare as a new born
Clamped to her side, happy as milk and honey
Five hours away from Surprise Surprise,
A meeting with Mr death.


9.The Offering

Long fringed skirts of cones
The green larick is lifting
An offering to the sun


10.Thoughts

Thoughts rise like bubbles
Wearing rainbow reflections
Each one burst by sleep


11. Scotland Lives: OK?
After The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, An installation by Damien Hirst

Pickled in the formaldehyde of forever,
Mary Queen of Scots continues to reign
Along my synaptic clefts

Memory's a rowan tree of myths
Neuro-transmitters cradle Flodden’s angst
The thistle, crushed and bleeding, a mighty army, crows meat.

The hemispheres of my mind
Track Allt na Giubhsaich,
A broken dyke, the cry of whaup and banshee
I am hard-wired to the history of a nation
The prism of music, lighting its every crannie
Its leafy glens flooding my mind’s receptors

Time ferments the loch of lineage
Deepens the self’s connections

Each moment the soft rain of language
Rises up from legend,
The hynie-back, the eildritch, the un-deid

This charts my life, a backdropp of belonging
The gritty roar of the city,
The hush of the North Sea’s incam