English Poems From The Mithers Poem by Sheena Blackhall

At the Circus Menagerie,1960s, Aberdeen
Roll up, roll up to enjoy
The dank, rank smell of the menagerie
Outside the circus tent, the mobile safari

Near the performers' caravans
Over the trampled grass, dim lights
Are strung like apples on electric wires
The great beasts pace and re-pace
Their wheeled, cramped cages
Their huge paws press down
Pee-soaked straw and sawdust

Restlessly, constantly, they prowl
Seeking a bolt hole. Their eyes spark fire
Meanwhile the generator throbs
And splutters, stinking of fuel and grease

So much pent up power!
Such growling rage!
And here we have come for an evening's entertainment
We have paid to gawp at the displaced
Denizens of jungles, the fanged
And fierce celebrities of the show

No whips torment them here
Only the claustrophobia of steel bars
Their sky is a steel roof, or a painted tent
Not even a glimpse of the ice-cold distant stars

Incongruously, half a field away
The North Sea breaks on the dunes of a frosty shore
Heedless of the closeness of the tents, the sad menagerie


The Mothers
Mothers come in every shape and size
Good, indifferent, evil, foolish, wise

Mama, maman, mammina
Mutter, Moeder, Maji, Bunda
Me, Mamula, Okaasan
Matka. Matinka, and Madre
Mor, Nanay, Mamoosya, Morsa
Metera, Ommi, Mutsi, Ma

Irena Sendler, a Polish employee
At the Warsaw Social Welfare Department
A mother of three
Smuggled 25 hundred Jewish children
Out of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust

The Nazis arrested her, tortured her,
Sentenced her to execution
Because the Gestapo were bribed, Irena survived
A mother, extraordinaire

Rose West lived at 25 Cromwell Street
Her cellar was a torture chamber,
Her step daughter, Anna Marie was taken there
Brutally raped by her father. Rose West held her down.

Heather, their daughter, told a friend
About that house of horrors
Rose and Fred murdered, dismembered, buried her
One of the many victims of that family from Hell

Mothers come in every shape and size
Good, indifferent, evil, foolish, wise

Kathy Headlee, mother of seven,
Founded Mothers Without Borders
Helping orphaned children around the world
Distributed relief supplies to orphanages,
Sent volunteers to Bolivia, Bosnia, Guatemala,
India, Mexico, Zimbabwe,
Uganda, and Nepal.

Mothers come in every shape and size
Good, indifferent, evil, foolish, wise

When she was five years old,
In her home of Somalia
Waris Dirie was a victim of female genital mutilation
When she was 13, her parents arranged a marriage for her
With a man in his sixties. A double whammy.

She ran away from home, arrived in London.
Worked as a model, then stopped.
Had four children. Changed course
Devoted her time to fight against FGM
She founded an organization called Desert Flower
Combatting that cultural evil around the world.

Mary Ann Cotton, she's dead and she's rotten
Lying in bed with her eyes wide open.
Sing, sing, oh what should I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton, she's tied up with string.
Where, where? Up in the air.
Selling black puddings, a penny a pair.

Mary Ann Cotton, she's dead and forgotten,
Lying in bed with her bones all rotten.
Sing, sing, what can I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton, tied up with string.
Murdered 12 children and deserved to swing

Lou Xiaoying was a poor, uneducated woman
She lived by scavenging through trash in Jinhua, China.
Then she started adopting or rescuing 30 babies
She found in the rubbish.
China's one-child policy, near starvation poverty
In rural areas meant many dumped a child
She saved them, when so many walked on by

When Josef and Magda Goebbels were married
Hitler witnessed their wedding.
Magda had six children in eight years,
One boy and five girls.
After Hitler committed suicide,
Magda combed her children's hair,
Dressed each in a white nightgowns
Put them to bed.
A doctor gave each in turn a lethal injection.
Magda and Joseph went to the Chancellery garden
They ordered an SS orderly to shoot them and burn their bodies. He obeyed.

Mothers come in every shape and size
Good, indifferent, evil, foolish, wise

La Musette
An Eastern European in the street
Plays his accordion. Watches passing feet
Hoping his tunes will winkle out a coin
From someone's pocket. Earned, not purloined

He squeezes out tunes of the Romany
To touch the heart, or jigs from Brittany
His peaky blinders cap sits at his ears
A busker, prince among his busking peers


Against the Wind
Into the wind a girl with braids is cycling
Around a boy the Autumn leaves are flying
Dead leaves, all resurrected from the earth
Yellow and brown and red, raised from their berth

One last hurrah, they dance across the sky
The wind drops and they fall down with a sigh
Winter will crust them, crumble them to dust
Their glories dashed to nothing, as all must


After Work
After work, a woman sits and knits
The coffee pot has poured a creamy latte,
This wedded pair have passed the need for speech
A husband's poured a soothing glass of wine

After work, a woman sits and knits
The coffee pot has poured a creamy latte,
This wedded pair have passed the need for speech
A husband's poured a soothing glass of wine

The coffee pot has poured a creamy latte,
His dungarees are dusty from day's labour
A husband's poured a soothing glass of wine
Her hands are creased with housework, soft and pink

His dungarees are dusty from day's labour
His palms are calloused, worn by years of toil
Her hands are creased with housework, soft and pink
The table's simple, flowerless and stark

His palms are calloused, worn by years of toil
After work, a woman sits and knits
The table's simple, flowerless and stark
This wedded pair have passed the need for speech

Blue Hydrangea
Hydrangea is a beautiful plant from Asia
China, Korea, Japan

Wild Hydrangea leaves are used by Buddhists
Brewed as a sweet tea
To drink as part of a cleansing ritual.

Hydrangea is the Buddha's flower
On the day he was born,
The sky rained down those graceful flowers
And poured sweet nectar "amaca"

In Japan, the Temple Gisozi is the temple of hydrangea

In Japan, the hydrangea's name is
"Looking for the water."

To celebrate the birth of Buddha,
The hall of each temple is decorated with flowers.
Set in the middle of the pool, and in its mids
Is a statue of the newborn Buddha.

Priests prepare dozens of litres of this sweet tea drink
As an offering to visitors
(The tea of the hydrangea has magical properties)
Hydrangea in the language of flowers, means remember me


Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, was a German artist,
A painter, printmaker, etcher, lithographer
Maker of woodcuts, sculptress,
Portrayer of psychological agony
Her subject was the deep distress
Inflicted by the wounds of war, want, poverty

Her father, Karl, was a radical social democrat
A mason and house builder
Her grandfather Julius was a Lutheran pastor

Her father saw her gift, arranged for lessons
In drawing and copying casts
When she was twelve she studied at Berlin
A protégé, her talent unsurpassed

At sixteen she sketched the workers, sailors and peasants
Who came to her father's offices
She studied art in Munich
Her themes were mourning, angst and hopelessness

At seventeen, she met Karl Kollwitz
They married. He became a doctor
Tending the poor in Berlin
By Art and Medicine, helping
The oppressed, and the outsider
Did she suffer from dysmetropsia,
Alice in Wonderland syndrome,
With sensory hallucinations, migraines too?
Anxiety dogged her always, a dark world view

She was proposed for a gold medal
At the Great Berlin Art Exhibition

Kaiser Wilhelm II refused it:
'I beg you gentlemen, a medal for a woman,
that would really be going too far...
orders and medals of honour belong on the breasts of worthy men.'

She was an advocate for the voiceless ones
In etchings, aquatints:
Plowing, Raped, Sharpening the Scythe,
Outbreak, After the Battle.

Peter, her younger son
Died on the battlefield in World War One
She sculpted The Grieving Parents,
Now in the Vladslo German war cemetery
Her constant call-
There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!

The Nazi regime rose to power. Hitler's brutality
Her work was removed from museums
She and her husband were visited by the Gestapo
Threatened with deportation
To a concentration camp, the Reich's finality
They stayed, endured, did not flee to America
For fear of reprisals on their family

Her grandson Peter died fighting in World War Two
Her house and studio were bombed
She died 16 days before the end of the war
In a time that widows and mothers came to abhor


Tourists
Deeside is beautiful, a rare magnet
You'll hear a host of language and accent
Dee draws admirers, acts like a dragnet.

Enjoy pure mountain air, come and forget
The city flumes. Here, time is better spent
Than trips to pyramid and minaret

Come to the Games, and watch the heavies sweat
Lace up your boots: try a Munro ascent
Or be a Sunday stroller, bring your pet

Are you a cyclist? Freedom's what you get
Along the Deeside line where train loads went.
Balmoral, Crathes, Braemar, don't forget

To visit castles if the weather's wet,
Go camping. Bring the family. Take a tent.
You'll maybe join the hunting, fishing set

Book a hotel, or rent yourself a let
Breath in the tang of heather, Heaven sent
This is a place with nature's jewels inset
Welcome to Hans, Sakura and Claudette!

Meet the Neighbours
The middle-aged man who lived with his student lover
The psychic woman who saw strange signs and auras
The ghost of a boy with acne who died a teen
The house where a jilted bridegroom hung himself
The immigrants who boarded their smashed-in windows
The Christians who spoke in tongues, oh Lordy Lordy
The arsonist whose home was petrol bombed
The man who dogged his ex and fondled cats
The wife-beater who kept a tidy garden
The free-range puss, the occasional urban fox
The man who wrapped barbed wire around his tree
The man who treated his car like a household god
May and Shirley who kept themselves to themselves
The widow who loved her Bingo and pink hydrangeas
The sun-worshippers who bared beer belly paunches
The reclusive-exclusives who lived behind high fences
The boy racer who revved his bike at midnight
The poshest tenant whose grass wis a G.I.'s haircut
(Poles, Nigerians, our street is multi-national)
The pets who left deposits and those who didn't


One day they'll turn
One day, the other residents of the earth
May rise, to attack the polluters of their home

Mutations of giant crabs may rise out of the deep
Their armour invincible, their pincers ready
To eviscerate any humans in their path

Leopards may scale skyscrapers,
Cherry pick office workers for a snack

Rhinos may decimate traffic lights
Smash cars. Trample pedestrians

Eagles may snatch babies from prams
Or uplift toddlers from playgrounds

All it needs is one pandemic,
Putting the human world in semi lockdown
Leaving animals to inherit the earth
To bring down civilisations
Restore a kind of Eden, the chaos of brutes


Over/Under
Willows under water live in a submerged world
Little fishes glide around the tall pole of their stems
Their roots are fixed in the mud of rotting leaves
The soggy bed of fallen ferns, drowned blossoms

Above the waterline, slender branches
Droop like the flyaway hair of dryads

At night, like a beautiful woman
Willow looks into the mirror of the water
The moon peers over her shoulders like a lover


Teatime
Mr McKay and Mrs McKay
Are whetting their appetites

She plays with a knife,
Salivates as she imagines the pleasure
Of slicing meat from the bone

Mr McKay holds a fork,
Like an agrarian Neptune

They have dug up a pumpkin,
To cook with the main course

Their main course is Percy, their pig
Percy is smiling. He feels like one of the family

Soon, they will plate him up,
Roast pork and pumpkin
Plus weeks & weeks of bacon rashers




Dr Samuel Johnson
Dr Samuel Johnson was a sage
His coat, his wig, his figure and his face
Were noted, greatest scholar of his age

He'd scrofula, a rolling style of pace
A blinking eye, the cursed St Vitus dance
His cat called Hodge, best of the feline race

The Doctor favoured veal. His insolence
Was famous… How he hoarded orange peel
His thirst for tea, his need for plums, his wit

He tapped each pillar, gave them a quick feel
He raged and then his furrowed brow would knit
His gruntings, puffings highlighted his zeal

A pedant, uncouth, man of genius
Slovenly, brilliant, odd but glorious


At Inveraray Jail
Hector MacNeil, aged 13. served 30days. Stole a turnip from a field
James Muckle aged 11, served 8 days. Stole apples
Margaret Maclarty, aged 14. served 30 days. Stole hen and white cotton shirt
Donald Mcdonald, aged 10. Served 20 days. Stole 12 lbs of cheese. Gaelic speaker only
Margaret Cowan, aged 11. Served 40 days and 3 years in reformatory school. Stole shoes and a pair of trousers for food
James Maclean, aged 11, served 14 days and 5 years in reformatory school. Stole 3 ducks.


Mount Stuart House
Here, libraries hold ancient books of witchcraft
There's murals by Francesca Peliozzi
In wood and marble carvers toiled, hard graft

A frieze of squirrels frisk, cut woodenly
Around the eaves, there's birds and beasts for eating
The ceiling's painted astrologically

In World War 1, the House was used for healing
2,000 patients in the marble hall
Elms, beeches, alders, sycamore and lime

Daffodils, bluebells, herbs grown to cure all
The Via Dolorosa, cypress, pine
Rowans and a clear tinkling waterfall

Mount Stuart House, its soaring conifers
Its rhododendrons, peace on all confers

Les Revenants
He's here again. I see him in the doorway
I look, see nothing, do not contradict her

Once I saw my grandmother by a field
As a little girl revisiting a place she'd deeply loved
A medium gave me a message from her when she died
A gypsy in Whitby saw her happy ghost
Trotting behind me on the pier

My mother swore her father stood at her bedside
After she had an appendectomy. He'd been dead for years
A psychic passed on messages from my son,
Things only he and I could know
And once, my dead aunt contacted me in a dream
Urging me to comfort my grieving uncle

Les revenants? Yes, they exist, but I do not dwell on them
Apart from the occasional pang of useless wishing