Some Eco Poems Et Al: The Young Wife Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Light Bites
Two customers in hijabs
Clear a table of someone else's detritus
Making a space for a disabled son,
His grandfather in a wheelchair

The staff are too busy
Dispensing coffee, to clean

Other clientele look away
They are hug their phones to their chests
Like comforters, like babies' dummies
Their ear-sets bristle like antennae

They do not want to be cut off
For a second. Not wanting to be out of the loop
Needing to be in on the latest gossip, celebratory news and fashion

The Earth doesn't care one jot
It is set to a different wave length
Climate change concerns it
The death of species
The thinning of sheets of ice
As humans skate on it

The Earth Speaks
Some species waste away,
While droughts, tsunamis, kill,
Some nooks, too hot to stay.

Now fertile fields turn gray
Trees die when gales grow shrill:
Rain forests pare away.

The future's made to-day
Will it be good or ill?
When will the death knell play?

To plastic junk a prey
The oceans drown in swill
And acid rains decay
Our world, in disarray

The future's made to-day
Will it be good or ill?
When will the death knell play?

Touching the Past
The hoard was found on glebelands owned by the Church of Scotland.
In the region of Dumfries & Galloway

Over 100 gold, silver, glass, crystal, stone,
And earthen objects from the distant Viking Age

It was found by Derek McLennan,
Rev Dr. David Bartholomew
Pastor Mike Smith,
Three metal detectorists
Seeking to touch the past

McLennan exhumed an arm ring,
Shouted Viking! !
Bartholomew called it ‘A heart stopping moment'

As was the legal requirement,
The find was reported to Scotland's Treasure Trove Unit
Who police important finds
When the past has a definite price in the world of today

And such a find!
Zoroastrian symbols from the Neo-Persian Empire
Items from Anglo-Saxon England, Ireland, and Scandinavia.

Ongoing research will use new technologies,
Will mine their secrets by using

3D modelling, CT scans, X-ray imaging

What will they tell us, those
Silver Anglo-Saxon disc brooches,
That Irish silver brooch,
The Byzantine silk from Constantinople
Those gold ingot and crystal objects wrapped in cloth.
That silver cross which may have come from Dublin
Those arm-rings inscribed with Anglo-Saxon runes
That miraculous Frankish pot?

The site was put under 24-hour security
A farmer housed his most ferocious bull
In the field to deter intruders, to keep the site secure.

That ‘safety deposit box that was never claimed'
Was finally cashed in.
The Church of Scotland claimed a share of the find
As the ‘bank' where the hoard was buried was kirk ground.

McLennan and the landowners shared the reward together
The National Museum of Scotland bought this piece of the past
for almost 2 million pounds.
The original owner, naturally, got nothing


Late summer break
Tree branches leap like steeple chasers
Racing the wind

Late summer get away in windy August
Press the on button, memories sharpen in focus

Thistles stand like lit tapers
The grass is weary with heat

Pools of trees are islands in the barley
A church stands guard above them
Its dead parishioners
Congregating in their earthen pews

A buzzard floats piratically
Over a grazing sheep

On the shore, waves are Thor's horses
Splattering on the rocks

On the sand a golden headed bird
Lies dead of Avian flu
Birds have their Covid, too


Fog
Sea-haar is the shroud of sea-souls
Rising up from the sea graves of the dead
Seeping up from shipwrecks and old bones
It blinds the eyes of the living
It is salt-wet as tears. It is mute
On the sea floor, a crab
Skirts round the body of a fish

Seaweed
Gut-weed, Irish moss, sugar kelp, coral weed
Sea lettuce, egg wrack, twisted wrack, dulse
Dabberlocks, saw wrack, sea oak, bladderwrack
Boot-lace weed, oar weed in the ocean's pulswe

Soft underwater, swinging on the waves
Soft as silk hanging in a breeze
Fragile seaweeds straining to the sunlight
Swaying like a hayfield, shimmying at ease


Coastal Wildflowers
Dog violet, yellow vetch, hottentot fig
Sea-pea Gladdon thrift sea lavender
Centaury sea kale sea couch grass
Sea pulse spring squall strawberry clover

Seaside curled dock Townsend's cord grass
Long leaved scurvy grass, sea aster, rest harrow
Lady's bedstraw tree lupin sea heath
Golden samphire, wild carrot, tree mallow

English stone crop, bird's foot trefoil
Carline thistle and yellow horned poppy
Sea club rush sea sandwort purple marram
Wall pepper sea wormwood milkwort sea holly

Coastal flowers on the shingle banks
Bright as bursting fireworks over the tide
Bright as tiny rainbows on sandy flanks
Jewels on the fringes of the sea's salt side