35 English Poems From Death Of A Tadpole Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.High Summer: Balquhidder
Summer sets out her usual sensual feast
The minuet of flowers, the leaves' gavotte
The orchestra of birds, the timpani
Of pattering raindrops on the tarn's pot

Forget me not and ragged robin gleam
Small points of paint from Nature's pristine palette
The air is full of songs and whirring wings
And nothing here to fear, or hurt the wallet

For all's true wealth, a boon that's freely given
After the shower, a fleet of snails raise sails
Slither across the lawn on silver feet
The passing rain clouds are Salomé's veils

2.Platinum Mars Superflous (Fictional Writer)
Platinum Mars Superfluous
Writes odes to hard-boiled eggs
His outlook is gregarious
His clothes are off the pegs

He sends his tales to Playboy
For gentlemen to read
In toilets with their trousers down
He's very rude indeed

Platinum Mars Superfluous
Has two inflated egos
As big as twin powered Zeppelins
He's stunning in his speedos

Platinum Mars Superfluous
Would never plagiarise
But sadly, as with vegan dough
His standards seldom rise

Platinum Mars Superfluous
Got sozzled on retsina
After that writing course in Crete
When told ‘make a sestina'

Platinum Mars Superfluous
Has fluttered many a breast
By scribing torrid love poems
(Byron, in shoe-string vest)

Platinum Mars Superfluous
As a child was never hit
And probably he should have been
He's grown up to be a shit


3.Meditation A
Meditation A
Fly's footfall on a lily
The silence of clouds


4.Meditation B
Did I dream that voice?
A daisy chain of grace notes
Singing in the wild


5.Toilets of the World
Some use fields and railway lines
Kuna Indians walk a plank
L'urinettes in Montreal
Are the ultimate in swank
Madame Pipi, Klofrau, Cludgie
Multicoloured like a budgie
Thunderboxes, Toilette Turque
Pissijns and chains that irk
Worst of all, Australian dunny
Though the outback may be sunny
Spiders may ensure, so fast
That visit to the bog's your last!


6.Listen to me
Why don't you eavesdrop on the world?
Imagine you're a spider, stalking her prey
Adopt a fictional character's identity
Be your own Agony Aunt?

Before you walk away
Ransack the personal things from a dead star's life
Consider what makes your cat sneeze
Dive with Moby Dick to the deep ocean
Imagination: the intelligent way to play


7.Antecedents
A musical freemason
A farming kirk precentor
A harassed harridan
A fenced in intellect
A precious hoard of words
A solitary lover of the wild
Twisted strands of a gene-chain
I tug behind me


8.I was Unprepared
I was unprepared
For the vice-like hinge of the burn
Snapping above my head
A frozen lid
Nor the depth-
The sudden drop from play to terror

Then nuzzling my thigh
The kelpie whinnied
Horse bubbles galloping up to the air
The hair at the fork of my legs
Was midnight lichen
The creature laid hidden eggs within its nest

So this is what conception's like, I thought


9.Death of a Tadpole: for Winnie, aged three
She claimed and named it Minnie, her first pet
Watched in wonder as it flicked its tail
Tadpole and little girl, both learning life

I changed its water. The out-slop hit the bush
I heard the gasp. Her eyes were brimming tears
Minnie, meanwhile was safe in a holding jar

When they were reunited her small face cleared
Her cheeks with wet still smeared
A small rehearsal for Life's bigger losses
The hardest ones, laid beneath urns and crosses

10.And I thought it was time to finish when
The monk jumped over the lazy fox
Twenty cranberries turned pale
I'd walked ten miles in another's socks
A record was made by a singing quail

Oh why are Mondays allowed to thrive
Cracking the whip on another week
Where do pot plants go where they die?
Where is the womb of Dolly the sheep?

Oh test tube world with genetic knots
Acid rain and global change
Have you seen the debris orbiting round
The world we use, like a rifle range?


11.She had a disturbed night
The falling dream, over and over
On the threshold between reality and dreaming
Her mind was a swing on Fragonard's painted garden
Arching from shade to light
The sundial wheeling wildly, a broken clock
The falling dream, over and over
But where? Not the gallery
Where people only go to admire the Art
A cliff or a high rise, a bridge
Like Icarus, tumbling out of a cloudless sky
While a ploughman's horse flicks a fly from its delicate ears
An unwatched tragedy

The dawn broke like new baked bread
To the cry of the cuckoo bird
That interloper in the lives of others
Its ego swelling, smothering its host
The falling dream, over and over


12.Persephone Speaks
My heart is Summer and Winter
If you sliced it open, you'd find a stone at its core
My blood is mercury, poisonous and silver
It thrills to nightingales and owls
My breath is cloud-spit and air-tangle
Whistling through the pan pipes of my lungs

A blackbird sings in my breast
Hopping from rib to rib

My teeth are worn down like Winter
An old wolf loping into the chilly woods of December


13The Artist
‘Draw what is there, not what you think is there.'
My drawing master was a gaunt, flamboyant man
Who'd worked in France, a Mìro copy-cat

I put my blood, bones breath into my Art
The boy of genius on the neighbouring easel
Declared for Art he didn't give a fart
He'd bunk off class, lay women and get pissed,
Pluck apples from the lucky tree I'd missed

An early lesson on the wiles of Fate
Better to learn it early, than too late


14.My Dark Secrets
My dark secrets stay in a locked chamber
Three misshapen Furies live in its black recesses
A Sybil is guarding the entrance
With a cleft lip, muttering riddles
Her belly's a sack of guts, bulging and rancid
She might spill the beans if ever she opened up

A perfectly formed devil with polished hooves
Eyes like infernos, all guns blazing, has me in his sights
He lives in my womb. It's arid's the hot Sahara

At night, my Furies rustle their crackling wings
They are sharpening their scissors to snip my fraying thread


15.The Jelly Poem
Aunt Beldie's raspberry jelly
with evaporated milk, was good
Sticky mouths and hands,
wasp traps of childhood

Nebulous floating jellyfish
Look like balloons, trailing tentacles of pain
An alien head, with swaying nerve-ends
Sizzling like electric cables, shorting in a drain

Jellies that teenagers use to hallucinate
Jelly that blows off limbs of soldiers,
All in the name of some sadistic state

The cellulite jelly folds of the gluttonous feeder
The jelly of many colours the new-born wears,
Slippery and inchoate
The cow eats that, retaking what was hers


16.Little Winnie
Her cheek is soft as a peach
A crackerjack
A whirligig
A snapdragon
A mischievous grasshopper

Winnie. Little grand daughter
With almond eyes and teeth like seeded pearls
Child of the lotus and thistle

Boo! Watch out! She's caught you!


17.The City of my Life
The city of my life has places I never visit
Dark alleys, roamed only by vermin
There, broken dreams and promises hum with flies

I refresh myself by entering the glassed-in gardens
Here, flowers riot harmlessly
And a small stream tinkles,
Wet and alive with frog-lets
The ceiling is sonorous with the songs of tiny birds

I rest from the furnace of the city
Marigolds drip sweat in ochre pots
A chink in the glass lets in the shaft of a memory.

Once, I stood on the edge of a precipice
Unsteady. The drop was deadly
An inner word arose, the sound of the universe
It reined me back, that word, that incantation

The secret to walking on water
Is simply to welcome drowning

Like a sick shark,
Fate will refuse you, over and over

Step onto the nebulous cloud that crosses chasms
The cloud that lives in the cloud beyond the cloud


18.Wild Swimming
Wild swimming. Everyone did it
Was there any other kind?
Waves were framed in pools of liquid ice
So cold you gasped when plunging into the pot

Midges, tics, clegs, nettles
Ant-hills, cramp, the childish dread of kelpies
We were like minnows swimming free
On the threshold of puberty,
The last splashes of innocence

No strategy, pure undiluted joy
And water tipping in sprays, in fans, in torrents
In sheer, untamed, unbridled ecstasy


19.There Was A Young Lady From Troon
There was a young lady from Troon
Who hit a golf ball to the moon
But the golf ball bounced back
Hit her face with a thwack
Now she looks like a pink macaroon.

20.Marmots
Marmots are like marmite
Some like them, some do not
They bred the cruel bubonic plague
Killed more folk than Pol Pot

Their cough spreads germs around them
Mongolian hunters say
Their armpits carry warrior's souls
They're nasty. Stay away

If their cough doesn't kill you
Their fat will cure the ague
I'd rather thole rheumatics
Than drop dead of the plague


21.Flowers for Buddha
Next to the Buddha's flowers at our front door
He came, full grown, a rickety adult fox,
An old one, tawny-grey not rusty red

He sniffed, surveyed the flowers, the Buddha, the door
Then loped away, racing towards the river
The most important guest to arrive in years
And no one there to bow and bid him enter


22.Vesak Day: Aberdeen 2016
Outside the temporary temple,
Western children whoop it up in a playground

There's a high rise, parking lots and concrete flags
The road is trashed with chewing gum and fags

Within, Thai, Malay, Burmese sit in silence
And meditate in pony tails and jeans

British Buddhists squat in Harem pants,
The men wear topknots like the Sumarai
While saffron robed, Thai monks chant ancient Pali

We each approach the shrine, with flower or candle
And dribble water down the Buddha's face
Briefly united out of time and place
Om muni muni mahamuni shakyamuniye svaha

23.Chihuahua
The smallest dog in the world,
(not Danka Korak of Slovakia)
Was dwarfed like a Chinese bonsai
And kept in a thimble of raffia

24 The Bee Poem
Chirrup pipe toot chirrup pipe toot
Quark pipe toot quark pipe toot

Their antennae are for ears
To waggle, dance,
To guide the way to nectar

Quark pipe toot quark pipe toot
Chirrup pipe toot chirrup pipe toot

In the sweet darkness o the hive


25. Urtica Diocia: The Stinging Nettle
‘Tender handed stroke the nettle, and it stings you for your pains
Grasp it like a man of mettle, and it soft as silk remains' Aaron Hill: (1750)

Green stingers, leg biters, plant torturers
Nettles lurk in wasteland, round football pitches,
In woods and ruined buildings, in railway lines and ditches

Battalions of nettles, hone their jagged leaves
The nettle's the cunning wife of the byways
Maker of sackcloth and beer, throat gargle and teas

Weaver of uniform, blanket, sailcloth
Bower for ladybirds, brewer of shampoo and broth
Jade lady, your element's fire, like the scratch of barbed wire
Beloved of tortoiseshell butterfly and moth


26. The Pessimist Reflects
Roofers fall, seamen drown
Aircraft pilots tumble down
Lumberjacks are often felled
Police get shot, soldiers killed
Drivers crash, doctors expire
Firemen die in others' fire


27. First Day, Married Quarters
I could have been a scrag end of meat
A lump of discarded masonry
In the zone of the married quarters
Like haricot beans zipped up in their secred pods
The streets, slated and bricked like clones

Three hundred miles from home
I didn't expect a ticker-tape 4th of July
I didn't expect ten chariots of fire
It felt like I walked on burning coals
Past anonymous windows, expecting an ambush

Somewhere, with squaddie comrades
My spleet new husband celebrated my coming
With beers and jokes, his wedded sex on tap

Turning the key in the lock, I entered the silent house
Everything signed for present and correct
Down to the canteen of cutlery,
The cooker, the mangle, the boiler

In the foggy garden, an apple tree
Held up its melancholy arms to the damp air

I set my case down in the unheated room
And waited, still and clammy as a mushroom


28. In-Gathering
Beneath the magnolia tree
Narcissi and primrose bloom
The chimes of the chapel clock
Echo in every room

Friends chatter like cooing pigeons
The sound creeps up the stairs
And the house feels warmed and lovely
Enjoying them being there

For a house is more than walls
Roof, or window, or door
Its fabric retains the imprint
Of all that has gone before

And night when it comes falls softly
As moonlight silvers the dew
And the owl through the trees in silence
Feathered, goes floating through


29. In the Curate's Garden
I walk in the footsteps of ghosts in the curate's garden
Trample a willow leaf in a crunch of gravel

Each day, the thrush as phoenix sings a new psalm
Its notes are sent first class, upwards to St Peter

Two oaks, long resident, are faithful retainers
Tenants process through from font to grave

Nothing here is set on the straight and narrow
A labyrinth of nooks, of peaks and drops
As if a monk had dipped his impish quill
Fashioning whorls of stone and stream,
Letting his pen run riot around the back of a mole


30.Acoustic Kitty
A real live cat was acoustic Kitty
Antenna in her tail, for spyin in the city
A radio transmitter underneath her skin
She was al; l wired up from her booty to her chgin
This cat was a feline 007
Till a taxi driver sent her up to Geaven
It wasn't technology overload
Nobody taught her the Highway Code


31.Daffodils
I like my poems sonorous, like great cathedral bells
To write them isn't onerous, for words have hidden spells
Come, trailing clouds of glory as the poet Wordsworth said
Whose daffies are still dancing long after William's dead


32. Cowan Bridge: 2016
‘Cosy, comfortable, Grade II listed stone cottage, in the beautiful Lune Valley
Nestling between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales National Park.'

Once, to stay here was a death sentence
‘Suffer the Little Children'
Typhoid, TB, cholera, malnutrition
The cruelty of religion at its worst

Today it rains, the weather wears teeth of ice
The wordless windows have locked their past away
Between despair and now, a child peers out
Trapped in the throttling mesh of Calvin's terrors

Bedwetting, homesickness, cold, build moral fibre
Reducing the physical to a brittle shell

Ghosts, they say, revisit forgotten agonies
From the cosy, comfortable, grade II listed cottage
Behind the bleary panes of the peeling windows
Look! Are haunted eyes still fixed on the passing clouds?