Suitcase (English Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Performers
Well, here I am in a little fishing village
Resting in a room kindly provided
Which I'll occupy for three days
Guest of a traditional folk festival
In which I happen to be performing

Did I mention it's also
The Queen's Platinum Jubilee?

She, too, will be performing
She's the star of the whole shebang
The screechy pop singers
The bunting, the fly overs
The street parties, the wrinkly interviewees
Everyone stuffing their faces
With cake
With trifle
With tea and empire biscuits
A weekend of corgies, horses and flags

But here I am hiding between events
Out of the way of people

I am not a natural performer
Perhaps the Queen is not a natural performer
But there she is,96,
Wheeled out to please the nation

Out of the spotlight
Does she flop on the bed, shoeless
Wrapping her privacy to her
Like a bat, cuddling its wings
Like a toy with its batteries removed?

She is held in the collective grasp
She will never evacuate her throne
Though the buglers are calling time
For last orders

How often have her family practised her funeral
For when after her star goes out and the credits start to roll?

Maytime
Trees stand in their Maytime dresses
Like debutantes at a ball
The wind blows their jade green tresses
Their ringlets rise and fall

Their heads are bright with blossom
Where brown birds doucely sing
It's May, and the sap has risen
When feather and leaf take wing

Like T-Rex
It felt as if it had rained for centuries
Drips fell ding-dong remorseless, over the drowned fields
As if summer had been deleted altogether

Even a pope might lose his faith in prayer
The Thinker up on his plinth
Was pondering arks and floods

And then, like T-Rex loose in a china shop
The sun burst out
Such a big thing
In our tiny world of happenings.


Epidemic
Bacteria swim like torpedo depth charges
Unseen predators
Like minuscule planets circling a black hole
Invisible invaders

Death dealers
Indiscriminate health wreckers
Life takers
Soul stalkers

So many victims lie like stranded fish
Meeting death, beached on a hospital bed
Panting from lack of breath
Alone
Suitcase of dreams
A Filipino mother left behind
Her family, took her dream across the sea
To ease their poverty she signed

A contract, which unhappily consigned
Her into virtual locked-in slavery
Where she was bullied, starved, by the unkind

Employers, who to all her pains were blind
Exploiting her, they used her cruelly
Removed her passport, phone, to tighter bind
Her to them, there was no way to rewind
Her steps, to escape back to her country
Her workplace was her jail, so close confined
To drudgery, the contract was designed
To keep her homesick, toiling endlessly
And never to find ease from labour's grind

She crossed the seas, in hope. All she could find
Was raw despair, of the most bitter kind


Ukraine (2
How fast people lose their identity
In the mangle of flesh and building!

The dead are worlds apart from the living
At the edge of the battlefield
After death drops from the heavens
First class delivery

Hate brings the merciless hammer down
The sickle of blood scythes old and young, uncaring

Ivy weaves necklaces round childrens' teeth
Limbs are trapped in the tumbling rubble of rot

All, all melt down in destruction's evil pot
People are shot in their gardens
Who should have grown old with their roses

War brutalises the spirit. Snaps the heart
And what of the watching child who sucks his thumb
Seeing his little world blown apart?
A scene from a tv screen, a war comic
Suddenly bursting into life; terror, off the chart


The Houses Nobody Wants
Welcome to Paradise House/flat/cottage
It's set in an outstanding location
Beautifully furnished. Two ensuite bedrooms
Parking- Patio- a well dug garden
Close to city centre with all mod.cons

There are houses nobody wants to buy
Notorious houses of horror, where killers lived
Where many committed the crime of murdering children

After the police activity, the hunt, the arrest, the trial
After the headlines are forgotten, the murderers tried and jailed
Who would want to stay in the home of a psychopath?

Mark Bridger murdered schoolgirl April Jones
In his cottage in 2012. She was 5 years old
The local council destroyed the paedophile's house
April's parents watched the demolition.

Fred and Rose West stayed in Cromwell Street, in Gloucester
They tortured and murdered 12 girls, their own included.
That house of evil was levelled in the nineties.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
Lived in Wardle Brook Avenue, Manchester
They killed five children at that house,
Buried the bodies on Saddleworth Moor
No one occupied that home for over 20 years
At last it was demolished by the council.

Paedophile Ian Huntley lived in College Close, Soham
He killed schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman
Within those walls. His home has been demolished.

Sometimes no matter how wonderful the place
How beautiful the location, infamy sticks
Horror seeps into the fittings.
It's better to wipe the traces off the face of the earth

Richard the Hunchback Monarch
Richard the hunchback monarch
Was the last Plantagenet king.

He was deformed, a devil's disciple
His spine was twisted with scoliosis.

When his brother Edward died
He was appointed protector of his nephews
Assuming the reins of power.

Two little boys, the Princes in the Tower,
Disappeared soon after, spirited into the air

Challenged by Henry Tudor,
Richard was killed at Bosworth in 1485.

Two of the wounds on the skull would have been fatal.
There were slashes to the face and the side of the head.
There were 'humiliation' injuries,
A pelvic wound from an upward thrust of a weapon,
Through the buttock.

He was given a hurried burial
Under the church of Greyfriars in the middle of Leicester.
His arms were crossed on his body
He was buried with his wrists still tied

Greyfriars church was wrecked by the Reformation
And after, for centuries, the King
Lay in the earth, like any old pile of bones
Till resurrected by excited archaeologists

His diet was high status
Freshwater fish, swan, crane
Heron, wine and roundworm parasites

His bones were placed in a lead lined ossuary
Within a coffin made from English oak,
And moved to Leicester Cathedral
The great and the good attended his funeral mass

In Norway twentyfive medieval kings
Are buried in unmarked graves around the country.
Harald Hardrada, was buried anonymously
Under what is today a public road.

Archaeologist at St Nicholas East Kirk in Aberdeen
Found the skeletons of 2,000 Aberdonians
They were stored in cardboard boxes

Syphilis was discovered with TB and osteoarthritis.
Blunt force trauma to the head was found
In at least four cases.

They'll be housed below the floor of the renovated kirk
In a mass grave, of course
No fancy funeral and masses will be said for them


Is it a Bare -Faced Lie?
A blind fish hangs in the scales
Its catcher is wearing a mask from a Greek tragedy
He is standing in front of an IKEA flat pack house
With a blood red window

Who dreamed him?
What lies behind the Mask?
Why does the eyeless fish have a split tongue?


The Arctic Fox
Sea shanty tales told on a sailor's fiddle
Of an old adventure, seeking the vanished men
Of the Franklin expedition, by bold jack tars

For two years caught in the Arctic ice
The hull of the boat was gript by frozen pincers
Later, thawed out, the tiny ship swept south,
Found traces of the missing Franklin expedition.

And all the while, rigging was strung with icicles
The crew sat carving scrimshaw on seal skulls
And like the creature of the small ship's name
They fed on birds, seal pups, and carcasses
Left behind by the deep furred polar bear

Three men were left in the cold embrace of the ice
The engineer, his assistant, and the steward
In that harsh land, where pity has no place

Traditional Sea Shanty:
It's a damn tough life full of toil and strife
We seamen undergo.
And we don't give a damn when the day is done
How hard the winds did blow.

We're homeward bound from the Arctic ground
With a good ship, taut and free
And we won't give a damn when we drink our rum
When we step to land from sea


Skeletons
Threatening coral reefs is ocean acidification
It is harder now for corals to build their skeletons.
Which stretch through fathoms up towards the light,
Acidifaction weakens their density
Makes them brittle as elderly human bones

Now they are vulnerable from storms, currents, waves
The bite and bore of parasites all harming
Carbon dioxide rising in the air
From fossil fuels, causing ocean warming,

The corals bleach, like ghostly presences
In Scottish deep sea waters
Those vital habitats of sharks, crabs, eels

A thousand years a coral bush can live
They thrive on oil and gas platforms offshore
But will prosperity enjoy these fragile reefs
Their deep sea mysteries, their citizens
That shelter in their feathery, secret selves?

I am Singing a Song to the Moon
I am singing a song to the moon
The mistress of tide and ocean
The ruler of night and owl
She moves with a stately motion

I am singing a song to the moon
The goddess of Druid devotion
The healer of sleep and death
Who amplifies lovers' emotion

I am singing a song to the moon
High priestess of spell and potion
Lady Luna, the werewolves' guide
The lunatics' stellar portion

I am singing a song to the moon
The mistress of tide and ocean
Ghost ship of the silver light
Who glides with a stately motion