Of Berserkers, Cows, & Lady Gaga (17 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.The Berserker
The last time I looked in my shield
I did not recognize myself
I’d forgotten what my own face looked like
Naked and white, human as melting ice

Who could stuff their ears with the scream of death?
Live with the stench of blood like a reeking pottage
so often, a surfeit of horror, and still be human?
The solution brings in the bear, the wolf, the shaman.

My face in the shield looks bleak
Lifting a sheet in the morgue and seeing myself
Alive under layers of bear growl, wolf howl

I bite my shield to strangle the terrible fear
Of living itself. Battle Fatigued, at night
The heads of those I’ve killed
Are singing apples on the Tree of Death

Some days when Odin’s sleeping,
This fear turns in on me. Makes of my skull
A gourd of bitter carnage.


2.The Spear of Destiny
There is a certain weapon ancients tell
Used by a Roman on high Calvary
That flashed, the Saviour’s agony to quell

Men say the lance contained a sacred spell
Constantine held it up for all to see
When crowned with incense, Holy Book and bell

Conquerors treasured it, the nonpareil
Of relics. Hitler in ascendency
Shipped it to Nuremberg, a Fascist jewel

Its power secured he thought it would dispel
All opposition with its pedigree
The lance, once housed in palace and chancel

Some hidden power, avenging archangel
Led men of William Horn’s C Company
To Nuremberg in Victory’s up-swell

The Holy Lance to US soldiers fell
When Allies held the Spear of Destiny
Walpurgis Night…by his own bullet shell
Hitler, the priest of Darkness, fled to Hell


3.Scan
Six centimeters long from crown to rump
A tiny cluster of cells is becoming human

Toothbuds sprout in the dark
Nails and fingerprints form on translucent skin

There it floats at anchor moored to the curled placenta
It squirms in the amniotic sac. The tiny fingers close.

The curling toes, the tiny growing brain
Practice their paces, ready to take their place
In the family line, filing blindly forward
Caught in a flash of film, a virgin pose

4.Owl
Packed eye feathers splay like a grandee’s ruff
Facial discs like dishes of arsenic
Swivel pale and deadly, Pierrot white

Ears hone in on frequencies high and squeaky
Owl pinpoints prey in the void
His sonic beam plumbing the depths of dark

Soft plumage hides his talons, rapier sharp
The empty night echoes to his twit-hoo
The whoosh of his swoop
Bringing death down on wings.


5.Jane Haining, Scotland's Schindler
Hers was a face no sculptor’d mould in plaster;
Plain Jane, but with a smile of deep content
Born to confront both terror and disaster.

A Scottish missionary, one of a cluster
Who died at Auschwitz, for a life well spent
Teaching the Jewish orphans. Faith, her master.

Then Hungary fell, too few in force to muster
Defence for all that the word human meant
When Fascist boots marched in, they brought disaster.

The Jewish children lost rights ever faster
As each of them were to the Death Camps sent.
The trick of dying isn’t hard to master.

Then the Gestapo car came for their pastor,
The Scot who crossed both waves and continent
Knowing her mission’d end in a disaster.

79467 was Jane Haining’s number
Brave heart, she followed where the children went
The trick of dying isn’t hard to master
To reject decency, that’s true disaster.


6.Deathly Shore
When the evening’s dark and the clouds are rags
Wrung out in a weeping sky
And the wind howls and the frost bites
And the fox creeps red and sly

Then the farmers’ knuckles are red and raw
And his boots are mired in mud
And the hedgehog hides in his bed of leaves
For winter’s in his blood.

When the broth is hottering thick in the pot
And the holly berries glow
This is the time when high on the moor
The hare turns white’s the snow

And bare, the trees stand stripped of all
Right back to their Pagan roots
Nor can they dance to the tune of man
Ice flowers in their frozen shoots

The oldest trees will be last to bud
When spring returns once more
They’ve known too many Seasons fall
Dead leaves on a deathly shore

7.Cow Tourists
The days of the Scots cow are over
No more Peggy, or Jessie or Bet
The French mademoiselles in the cow-shed
Are Louise, Celeste, Antoinette
Every dairy queen carries a passport
For nipping all over the globe
With her details attached like an earring
Pierced into each hairy ear lobe

You or I might jet over to Egypt
For a fortnight of camels and heat
But your average cow would choose Delhi
Where she’s sacred, and life’s one long treat

There, one day each year they are pampered,
With garlands, and fruit…the good life
Not herded in byres in a blizzard
Awaiting the slaughter man’s knife

A Jersey would loath a safari
(The Masai tribe drink the cow’s blood
And there isn’t much grass in the desert
Where cows tumble down with a thud)

In these days of increased foreign travel
A cow may jump over the moon
To populate distant Uranus
With her natural wind as a boon


8.The Flight of the Turtle
Turtle is almost blind. She feels her way
Through waves and currents of oceans
Using the strength of the earth's
Magnetic field to chart her course

Her head is an armoured penis
Carapace of platelets form her shell
On land her eyes dropp tears excreting salt
Caretta Caretta, seven feet long
Full twenty stone of gentle swaying history.

Forty million years this ancient nomad’s
Scaly kin, have hauled themselves ashore
To leave their mark, to leave their progeny
All the while the Hittites, Phrygians
Amazons, Persians Romans came and went
Byzantine, Ottoman, shifting sands of peoples.
Hindus call her the soul of a dying sinner,
Chinese think she is a bowl of health
Forming the very vault of Heaven itself
Apollo strung her shell, for the first lyre
Aphrodite’s best-beloved creature, Caretta Caretta

Twenty years it has taken her to mate
Bringing her back to her birth-beach, warm sand.
Troy fell, and still she crawled along the beach
Digging a pit for a hundred creamy eggs

For sixty days they lie, till the moon is right
The flight of the hatchlings is a lunar happening
Tiny, they steer to the moon on the water’s surface
Navigate towards the lunar seascape

Crabs pincer movement sidestep over the beach
Skritchal-whump-Sloosh
Catamaran crab’s spindle-hop sidewinder sidestepping
Skritchal-whump-Sloosh

Stiletto legs eye-popping-talks fathom the lurch
Of hatchlings, on the sludge and stir of sand slide
Slither-drag-crunch, they crush small shells to smush
Primeval Frisbees, discuses with flippers,
Pie-crust horn-backed scrabblers, the hatchlings race
Scramble-hobble-wobble-tilt into the beaks of birds

Floundering UFOs they lop-side onwards
Scampering over cooling sands to the surf
Snakes, crows, herons, seagulls snatch them off
The handful of survivors, like picking peas from a plate

The door to the sea is over the burning beach
A hectic dash from nest to grave, or wave
The greeny soup tureen of the Mediterranean

There, the drifting currents tow them off
Buffeted by tide like a powerful train
Shunting them back and fore in rhythmic motion

Before lie many hazards, Caretta Caretta
Traps, pots, trawls and dredges wait for you
Docks and marinas eat away your shores
Sharks, seals, whales, raw sewage, oil spills

Shrimping, fishing, netting, Caretta Caretta
Your flesh is a soup, an aphrodisiac
Much coveted. Beware discarded plastics
The light pollution of neon bars and streets

Toxic chemicals, marine debris
Your shells makes pretty trinkets, Caretta Caretta
Blind, gentle creature of a waning people
Your beaches shrink, horizons drown, turn sour.

9. Lament for a Poetry Nook: Tune: Black Velvet Band
Lesley Duncan a graduate of Glasgow, as a poetry Ed. she was grand
And many a poet she published to be read by the whole of Scotland
But a great misfortune’s befallen us, the paper’s deleted that nook
Where many’s the upcoming poet, found an audience outwith a book

Chorus
In a once-daily slot in the Herald
The poems were the best in the land
Now from the Gretna to Shetland we’re mourning
That column with poetry to hand

One day you’d meet Wordsworth extolling, the pleasures of lily and cloud
The next you’d encounter Ed Morgan, plucking pen sketches out of the crowd
John Clare, Kenneth Steven, Keith Murray, Robert Frost or a Sunny haiku
There was never a Central belt bias, with cosy wee reads for the few

Where else will the Muse find a corner, to crystallize views about peace
Devolution, Sex War, Family Matters, or an activists’ longed for release?
Oh prose may be fine for the weather, or the scores clocked by footballers’ boots
But where will go to find poetry that most Celtic of Celtic pursuits?

We’ve stated the case and it’s proven, Herald owners, your duty is clear
At the earliest possible moment, the poems will soon reappear
So stand up for justice and culture…the poet should never be banned
In the country of Burns and MacDiarmid, and that’s why we’re making this stand!


10. In Chalet-Land
In chalets, ‘lecky meters whirr, through sunshine, blizzard, rain & smirr
A pond’s ‘a loch’ in brochure terms, ‘A forest’...well-pruned trees and ferns
‘Majestic landscape’s’ hills with farms, ‘A nature trail’s a pool with charms
Of tame ducks squawking after bread. No osprey hovers, since the spread
Of golf retirement cosy streets where geriatric swingers meet
Or moan that they are under par...I wonder where the squirrels are.

The wildlife must have upped and fled
From lawns like those, well groomed and dead
The waitress in the restaurant, is friendly as a cactus plant
I’m told the hen dos are a blast but nature lovers...drive on past.


11.The Vanishing Osprey
They seek it here they seek it there, the tourists seek it everywhere
And then they see a gull and cry ‘Look! There’s the osprey in the sky!

Ah, poor deluded naturalist, demented, blind, or two thirds pissed
I am afraid to tell you that the osprey flitted some years back
When the first bulldozers appeared and neat retirement homes appeared
In Osprey Place and Roundabout and drove the great sea eagle out
But there’s a pond. If you’re in luck it’s possible you’ll see a duck.


12.Angus Dawn
The frost’s like stardust over the spears of grass
With tiny movements of birds, the branches stir
Sunlight shifts like the glow of a candle mass
Under the creaking eaves of a wood of fir

A robin sings, the blush in the throat of day
The rabbits sleep in their dens deep underground
A single silent needle parts the air
Drops to the forest floor without a sound

The rolling Angus hills beyond are round
Round and combed by the ploughshare smooth and neat
The soil’s like the hair of an ancient Celtic queen
Each twisted furrow a brown and glistening pleat


13.Ducks at Piperdam
Synchronised swimmers: three ducks performing
Bold as brass. Pulling a water triangle along the pool
A mallard swims for the reeds. From the reedy bank
The resident cheer leader squawks with clacking beak
Necks corkscrew under wings like tubas’ pipes
The great sun orchestrates the lapping waves


14. Woodland in October
The acorn cup’s like a friar’s tonsured pate
Mushrooms bloom in the shadows half unseen
Dusk brings the timid rabbits out to crop
The frosty grass, under the groaning firs
Speckled toadstools ring the secret ways
Of sharp beaked blackbirds hunting on the hop
Twigs wear the nimble spider’s flimsy shroud
The full moon hangs in the sky, a sad-eyed pumpkin

15. Broch Road Blizzard,2010
Each empty-bellied cow stares into the maw of hunger
Cars drive by with rooves like rising loaves
Ice has locked the lid on the earth’s pantry
A robin shakes hydrangea’s pom pom head

Wastes of white are pierced by lights of cars
Slicing a way between the snow-drowned dykes
A gritter driver, ice dropp at his nose
Red thread veins on his cheeks
Powers a path through all-enfolding drifts

Snow piggy backs on tombstones where the chilly dead
Like still in rows like antique cutlery

Sky is cream, swirled by a giant’s thumbprint
Clouds like the brains of a hare scudding across white acres
Season of muffled speech, of all things seeking shelter.


16. Elizabeth Siddal’s Grave
Pre-Raphaelite Brothers: Siddal was their star
Beautiful green eyed Lizzy. Autumn’s breeze
Topples the apple to the forest floor
Rossetti’s wife fell with a self-taught disease.
Her love of laudenaum, unlocked death’s door,
The artist, cutting off their marriage ties
With tears, set by his poems in her lair,
Thinking symbolic acts would bring him ease.

Seven years elapsed. His fickle Muse had failed
A midnight exhumation then betrayed
His dead wife’s sanctity, disordered mate!
His poems retrieved, his long-dead love unveiled
Her copper hair, her glory, all arrayed
A sleeping beauty lying there in state


17.Lady Ga-Ga’s Meat Dress
She stands and poses in her dress of steak
Attired from head to toe in uncooked meat,
And what a stir her fashion foibles make!

Aeons ago, on fur-bound, frozen feet
Neanderthals progressed, became adaptive
Roasted their kill, rendered its juices, sweet,

Yet here she stands, provocative, subversive
Attention seeking with her ‘Look at me’
Her food stunt keeping paparazzi captive.

Maybe it is an anti-fashion plea
Stating that the red carpet treatment should,
Be obsolete…shallow celebrity

Maybe it’s feminist, pondering should
Men treat their wives like chattels wearing rings
Just there to cook and clean and raise the brood

Or is it a new art form’s weird birth pangs,
A commentary on decay’s release
Of death’s corruption where the red skirt hangs.

Perhaps she rails at vanity. The face
That’s painted. Fame so quickly fled
Media moulding the soft populace

Her critics shod in leather, write a spread,
On how disgusting and how out of place
Was Lady Ga Ga…and her purse that bled.