John Glenday Poems

In the house where the smoke slides down the lum,
She watches the clock compact its tensing coils;
Reeling time back to its hidden spool, as she waits
For her drowned man to be ferried to the sea.

"Where is the ship which will sail for the jug-lipped storm
Stern first, and the sea's warp perfect through the bow?"
The tide shrugs shoulders, toys with a captive moon,
As the jetsam springs triumphant to the swell.

She remembers when she was old, and growing young,
While the stream climbed skywards on the brackened hill,
How she dreamed of a place where the glassy threads
Unwound to a single strand, in an unreflecting pool;

Where the butterworth shyly retracted its frail, blue face,
And the thirsty moss flourished, drawing in endless seas.
...

I cannot see my mother's face;
no longer know my father's name.
It's the forgetting of the world
keeps me sane.

A stranger's laugh, a neighbour's death;
my wife's despair, my daughter's grief.
It's the forgetting of the world
gives me breath.

The hungry, old, surrounding sea,
heaves at a field's worn edge in me.
It's the forgetting of the world
sets us free.
...

And so they come back, those girls who painted
the watch dials luminous and died.

They come back and their hands glow and their lips
and hair and their footprints gleam in the past like alien snow.

It was as if what shone in them once had broken free
and burned through the cotton of their lives.

And I want to know this: how they came to believe
that something so beautiful could ever have turned out right,

but though they open their mouths to answer me,
all I can hear is light.
...

Rags frae the moon and tatters o sun,
We'll fly awa when time is done.
Wind for a sark; the sweet yird for shoon.
Rags frae the sun; tatters o moon.
...

I read about him that was given wings.
His father fixed those wings to carry him away.

They carried him halfway home, and then he fell.
And he fell not because he flew

but because he loved it so. You see
it's neither pride, nor gravity but love

that pulls us back down to the world.
Love furnishes the wings, and that same love

will watch over us as we drown.
The soul makes a thousand crossings, the heart, just one.
...

i.m. Mike and Barbara Heasman

Let us now give thanks
for these salt-blown

wind-burned pastures
where outgrass and timothy
shrink from the harrow of the sea

where Scotland at long last
wearies of muttering its own name
where we may begin

to believe we have always known
what someone in his wisdom
must have meant

when he gave us everything
and told us nothing.
...