Of Krackow And Micro-Fictions (8 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1. Seven micro-fictions

His dead face pressed against hers
Could have been snow
A snail crawled on the wall
Of their gutted home.

She misbehaved in public
Took hostages from marriages
Led men into stolen sunlit
Miniature betrayals
Counting the rings on the trees

The geography of culture was a con
He spoke like a Cambridge don
But entered Scotland
Like a stone through treacle
Intellect coated with years of
Fleshing the fruits of friendship
Digging back to his roots

Frost cracked like a pod
The night was empty of everything but moon
Poor ghosts, locked out from their own home
And all for a single pomegranate

A speck of yellow pollen died on the page
The hammock froze, mid-swing
Behind the asylum

A blue horse with a massive head
Whirled around in a circle
Worms spilled from the mouth of a plastic bag
Dreams, sluiced away
From the head of the pregnant girl
On the mortuary slab

Every woman carries a passport
The sea urchins of her breasts
The oyster of her womb


2.1958

Mother twisted papers, lit the fire
Klansmen rode out in Maxton, North Carolina.
America launched a satellite into orbit.
Eight footballers fell from the skies of Munich
Crowds marched against the Atom Bomb in Britain
Elvis Presley joined the US army
Riots broke out in London's Notting Hill
Every Friday our class sat a mock IQ test

The Cold War rumbled on.
The Mau Mau rose.
My father read 'The People'.
Soot blew into the parlour.

Great Balls of Fire — Who's Sorry Now?
It's Only Make Believe, claimed Conway Twitty.
I passed the 11 plus. The street was told.
My father pressed a fiver in my hand.
Can I stop swotting now? I quizzed my mother.
More books arrived. A uniform. A look.
You'll have to speak in English, now, they warned.
Why can't I go to Franny's school?
I asked Franny was fun, was twelve but acted twenty.

Odd how success can leave a sour taste
There's no free lunch. Only a treadmill creaking
Just beyond the reach of dew and strawberries.


3.How this Poem Came into Being

In a day of snow and sun, while my neighbour
Put his back into shovelling a clear path
These words welled up like blood from a cut
And dropped fresh onto the page.

Outside, children sledged on new white hills
Words queued up from silence,
From the mind's abyss
And swung from a thought's birth cord
Crying out to be heard

A wolf from a story long forgotten
Padded quietly up and blinked his yellow eyes
Then melted back into the brain's morass.


4.Guddling for Fish

My father swore I was a quarter fish.
Never out of the burn all summer
My feet became changeling flippers
White in the pool's glass

I bent, hour after hour
Watching clouds scud by in the waves' reflection
Scooping minnows into a berry jar

Captured, they glowed in the sun,
Commas of purloined gold
Fleeter than hares on Glen Quoich
Or the deer that spilled like wine
From the Spital's sides.

A small, rapacious, Caesar,
I bore them in triumph
Back to the hot slab of the window sill

By morning, they were putrid
A fleet of foundered boats
All the bright colours faded.


5.Winter Rains

The passport into the housing scheme's one-way
Excrement etches the pavement,
Leeches into the ground.

Car tyres smoulder on burnt out stumps of waste-land
A girl's mouth, studded with herpes,
Draws on a spliff.

A church like an armoured tank
Guards its collection box,
Gathered for African needs.

A dead rat's head, lies on a nest of newsprint
Nobody dies of hunger in this street

Airgun pellets control the local cats
Road-kill carries folk off in stolen cars
Or smack, with a knock-out punch
They don't come round from

A girl with her skirts hitched up
Takes her lover on, in a bus stop reeking of pee
Outside, her bairn in its buggy
Wails with snot-caked cheeks
Sex is the interlude, between shopping and tea.

The CCTV cameras, conscience implants
Preside, omnipotent
In this land of knocked-off, knocked up
Half-inched misery

Rottweillers dog the walks, with ball-sacks
Fit to burst
A thousand eyes with their lights fused
Stare out from bleary panes
Each heart as dark as soil
Sodden by winter rains.


6. A Trip in Poland

We enter the transport; the seats are warm and soft
We purr along the road in an upbeat gear

The small brick country houses hold no secrets
Little black hens like nursery rhymes, pop out
From terracotta doorways, into sunshine

We pass a coal-cart hauled by two black horses
Their toothless master's walnut-shrunk and dozy

Women with wooden rakes turn hay by hand
A roadside shrine shows Mary's painted face
Smiling out, an icon of bliss and mercy

A mile away from where Nazi ovens burned
The yellow beehives could be mediaeval
But for the bus-stop, covered in graffiti
Defaced, perhaps by the stone-faced ancient woman
Shriveled like a prune who sits and waits
Impotent against the loss of beauty

Pigs like round black barrels, snuffle and grunt
A goose reverses out from a rickety shed
Not like the S.S., no, she widdle-waddles

A barebacked farmer, braces round his buttocks
Pees majestically on a weeping willow
His wife in a blue-flowered pinafore, pegs out clothes
Behind tall cypress trees, of oats and wheat

Polish signs with letters half scored through
Lean against peeling stucco. We're in town
Heavy, oaken shutters, keep out spies
Rotten ghetto tenements slowly crumble
Crazy chimneys tilt like tiny Pisas
A warren of alleys lead to a scholar's motto
Plus Ratio Quam Vis: Reason Over Force
Maximianus has the final word.


7.Legends of Old Kracow

The Kracow bugler at the gates of dawn
Died with a Tartar arrow in his throat

Invading Tartars sought to ravish nuns
Cliffs opened up, like doors, to give asylum

An iron knife hangs from a Catholic tower
Justice is sharp, the drunk tanks here fill quickly

A witch transformed a prince's train of knights
To pigeons. Gold came raining from their wings

The cellars of the palaces are haunted
The devil sits forever catching hen-wives

Lions loll beneath Kracow's town hall
If virgins sit on them, they rise and roar

King Krak awoke a dragon in its cave
A cobbler fed it sulphur stitched in sheepskin

The salt mines have 200 miles of tunnels
With dwarves and gargoyles hewn in crystal grottos

Above St Catherine's church: her wheel of Death
The symbol of her martyrdom, hangs grim.

Here, Oscar Schindler ran his factory
The ghetto quarter held 20,000 Jews
All shoe-horned into narrow streets of houses

At Remuh's cemetery, a wailing wall
Is built from gravestones SS soldiers smashed
(Those tombstones not recycled into roads.)


8.Trip around Kracow

Under the sign of the spider,
Kracow trams run late.
All are on general re-routing
Jump on, see where they'll take you!

It's sunny, and you are a tourist
Half-drunk hedonists saunter across the square
Off to ogle Franciscan monastery mummies

By the Square of the Fishponds, a cormorant shakes its wings
A toddler's licking froth from a plastic dummy
A pink straw please or else she's going to scream!

Under the Butcher's Gate, a hairy sportsman
Knee in a stretchy bandage, the soles of his trainers
Pumped high as his coconut muscles
Flirts with the passing women...Give me a kiss.
Where do you keep your dragons?

By the Inn of the Chicken's Foot
Two lovers fondle. Her Japanese top-knot
Lets down one sly strand.
A girl in a cigarette kiosk chats to a mobile phone
One-sided conversation heard at Minsk

A man with three front teeth
(Old as sheep's cheese gone cracked)
Holds forth to his tribe, surrounding him at table
The youngest has legs like a sparrow with two grey socks.
Their plates are piled with pork meat stuffed with prunes
Cabbage, potato, bread, a lure for flies

Two streets from the Capmaker's Tower
Three Brits in shorts and T.shirts
Are stumped by the foreign menu
Beetroot soup? Pig's trotters? This is a Polish thing?

Down by the River Wisla, a melancholy Slav
Lifts his hand to his greasy pony-tail
He is dreaming of herring in cream served up with onions,
Before he visits the bank to seek a loan.

Under the sign of the Pear, a lugubrious Turk,
His neck like an ancient tortoise
Reads the Financial Times.
His shoes are scuffed. His cup of coffee's empty.

A drunkard with an Irish wolfhound's beard Mutters:
It's my liver. I don't care
The clouds above are peaky white meringues
Floating upon a sapphire sea of Vodka

A sweaty jogger, runs with bouncy breasts
Along the busy Boulevard of Roses
At the Professor's Steps, the Dragon's Den,
Foreigners try out weird, Kracovian phrases
Please may I fondle your buttocks?
I'm having the heart attack. I think it's Tuesday.