Of Travellers: Shodo, The Seine Et Al (13 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

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1. The Travellers

'I'll have a limousine, ' said Sean.
'I'll have a plane, ' said Jill.
'Some shelter, food and clothes, ' said John
'I'll have a bank, ' said Bill.

'Never enough, ' said Anthony
`Just give me more, ' said Ann
'More money, luck, celebrity
More everything, ' said Dan.

Possessions bring their own concerns
A box, a lock, a key
Of which, poor John not having much
Was relatively free.

Old age devoured celebrity
Ill health removed the zest
For gawdy trinkets, time-share homes
Grim Death dissolved the rest.

The lawyer took the limousine
(it isn't cheap to die)
The undertaker took the plane
The bank, by then, was dry.

Fate lasts a moment...beauty too
It needs no master plan
To travel lightly through the world
Doing the best you can.


2. Dinner on the Seine

The bateaux-mouches along the Seine
Kick lacy flounces at their train.
Warm evening. On this quay in France
Punters pay well for canned romance.
A divertissement. All are dressed
Faces are rouged and shirts are pressed
The bourgeoisie are out to get
Their money's worth. Here, each coquette
Outshines the chandeliers...bijoux
As thrilling as a billet-doux.

Elegant as the Tour Eiffel
An anorexic Breton Belle
Strolls on with her Parisian beau
The crew weighs anchor. Off we go.

The glittering Seine, a sexual vine
Sends waves each vessel to entwine
A water nymph, wet limbs afloat
With pearls of bubbles at her throat
.
With oos and ahs, blondes and brunettes
Toy with their hair – or serviettes.
The menu comes: gourmet cuisine
With pumpkin soup and chestnut cream
With Burgundy snail fricassee
All served with charm and Chardonnay.

A roué and his young cherie
Swap badinage and bonhomie
I order breast of duck, well done.
The Notre Dame dies with the sun
Till resurrected by the day.
It will rejoin the tapestry
That's Gaul. Cognac and cabaret
French Haute Couture and Haute Cuisine
Napoleon and Josephine.
Chateaux, gateaux, the French Bastille
The guillotine with mouth of steel
Cold kiss where that cruel master met
The neck of Marie Antoinette.

Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire –
Such ghosts hang subtle in the air.
The Auld Alliance, French Dauphin,
Voltaire, Apollinaire, Gauguin,
Versailles, the Louvre... The Metro:
The frisson that is Art Nouveau;
Seurat, Monet, Matisse, Renoir;
Nine in a Champs Elysee bar;
Saint Joan of Arc. Brigitte Bardot
Tin-Tin, de Beauvoir, Pissarro
Montmartre, where each chic boutique -
Holds bargain hunters for a week...

The duck arrived. When sliced apart
Beneath brown flesh, a crimson heart:

Paris, that ancient whore, that cheat,
Even dictates how we should eat.

I cursed the chef, the boat, the band,
The repertoire, mechanic, bland;
The singer, too hard-boiled by half,
And then...Mon Dieu! she sang Piaf.
Raw, bleeding, naked, an adieu
To all things past, from all things new.

A ruined poster on a wall
Peeled from its berth, a fading scrawl
Where, forty years ago, just there,
I'd stood, with blossom in my hair

The intervening years, like rain
Dissolved. I was that girl again
I glanced into the champagne glass.
A hag stared back – the coup de grace.


3.At the Moulin Rouge

Kicking heels, no cares, no bra
Topless hoofers, oo la la
May be fine for Alan Whickers
Sailor boys or city slickers
But its bad for dicky tickers
Watching French girls
Flash their knickers


4. The Shodo Artist

In traditional blue kimono, white cotton split-toe socks
The pint-sized Shodo artist kneels to her art.

Outside, the sun falls warm on gnarled walnut
A Scottish sparrow chirrups on its bough

The artist flows into the ink
It dries. She lifts her face to the crowd
A butterfly opening its wings that's just sipped nectar.


5.The First Days of Spring

That wild stampede of the leaves into the ground
A young girl on a balcony studies herself in the mirror.

Her mahogany hair will fill with twigs and webs.
Flowers are battering their way into the light
Pensioners feel like tourists in this Season

Dogs wag their tails like flapping scarecrow sleeves
Solemn Memoirs suddenly seem redundant

The world's Compass points to a jubilee
An Orchard sprouts from a Cox's pippin chess board
Skylarks, pigtailed skippers, love such days
When constellations of lilies spill their gold

In car parks, countless hot affairs are started
Misery's Hydra-head is newly outlawed
And shepherd's tend their fields of white meringues

Myths trip out of their caves tricked out in beads
Usherettes on the cusp of a smoky shift
See Spring pop up behind each chocolate advert


6.Zoya

A breath of Kashmir
Blows in a Scots schoolroom,
Exchanging Himalayas for high rise flats

Zoya, in kingfisher blue
Light as a lotus
Flutters over her charge
A mute, autistic Jew

He is a small, stone egg
That sometimes cracks
Lets out a whirlwind
She is the calm that holds him
As a pool contains the moon

He is in this world, but not
She is in this city, but not

Over noonday tea
She says she studies international law...
A PhD. which she intends to use.

Outside, a cloud darkens the summer sky
A dark bruise.
'My mother worries I may disappear
When I go home. It happens.
She wishes I'd do medicine instead.
Of course I won't.'

Kashmir kingfisher
Fragile, flashing wings
Now you see it
Now you don't.

7.The American Bun

There was an American bun
Who went to its work with a gun
If people complained
It politely explained
'If you don't like it partner, then run.'


8.September, Brig o Dee

Two ducks float backwards
Not going against the stream

There is preening of wings
A flurry of take offs and landings

One gull is out on a limb
A small white lighthouse
Nobody's going to visit

A heron's hunched on a rock
A feathered Busby
Each bird flies solo
Carries no surplus freight

A black shag shakes its tail
Legs apart, like an old man at a urinal
Its beady face is blank
As sightless marbles


9.Pillow-talk with Mussolini

In the official fever hospital,
Windows were closed like clams.

The world was high and dry outside our walls
The ward was a drowned Atlantis

In the next bed to mine
An old woman, her hands like a speckled trout,
Turned belly up and died.

It was the typhoid summer
Under the sun's round microscope, we fried.

A schoolfriend sent me Mussolini's biography
'I saw it- thought immediately of you'....
(Though I am not Italian nor a Fascist)

He lay beside me, Il Duce, on the pillow
His spine so stiff, his jaw like jutting granite
In a photo, his corpse swayed idly from the gibbet
Like the ward curtains, over the dead flies.


10.The Intended

This hat alone cost two weeks bloomin' wages!
Three chiffon roses! Don't I look a swell,
Buttoned an' bowed in ribbons, steys and laces.

I'm Mary Fanthorpe, spinster of this parish.
My Albert's paid to have this photo done.
He's overseas just now- he wants my likeness
To carry when he's fightin' in the Somme.

My ma ran up this dress, all nipped and tucked,
This parasol don't half look la-di-da
That nice photographer, he give me props,
A floral backdrop, like the Music Hall.

My Albert needn't take no liberties
Because he's paid this bloke to have me took.
I wonder if the weather there in France is sunny now?
We've rain, in Hebdon Brook.

He's delicate is Albert, got a chest.
His mother packed spare socks...an extra vest.
Know what I likes about him? Albert's clean.
He even buffs his nails...a proper gent... and what a lark!
He's sleepin' in a trench!

We're savin' hard to put down on a place.
It's rainin' cats and dogs out. Quite a flood!
This weather's goin' to ruin my hairdo...
Me with my white lace boots, in all this mud!


11. The Plunderers

Bone tired of rowing through the whale black waves,
we reached that shore, through sea-surge,
One star burning.

Crossing the harbour bar, the hull had rolled,
The mainsail humped and cracked,
The boats in that strange mooring dwarfed our vessel.
Manfreid swore they'd come from Jotunheim,
The home of giants who menaced the world of men.
Skogdin said he dreamed wolves ate the moon.

On shore the street lights burned without a flame.
Strange wheeled carts flew by, propelled by wizardy,
For no beast drew them, neither horse nor ox.

We'd hoped for prizes, plunder, glory-fights.
Instead we found their warriors slumped on the streets,
Death in their faces, rattling begging bowls,
Their women too, skulls rising through their wasted skin
Like icebergs beside granaries of food
Stacked high in glassy towers.

No sentries, soldiers...all the others staggered as if drunk,
Shouting in strange tongues. Some horrid pestilence was here,
And nothing worth the stealing.
No cattle, gold, no flocks to drive away.

Fearing to catch the smit of their queer palsie
Thorfinn told us all to flee back to the ship.

I am an old man, now, but there's no bribe
Could stir my bones to sail that way again.


12.Backpacker

My brother had it all‑
Talent, good job globetrotting up the Amazon
Down the Seine.

He sired no offspring though, his fault, not hers.
He needed to leave our inbred neck of the woods
Strike out on a limb. Be his own man.
So when they cut that man-thing from his back
His half-made twin,
Small sack of teeth and hair
There were no words at hand to fit the case
Forty years he'd lugged that inner sibling
That backpacker he never knew was there
That incubus from where he'd tried to leave.


13.The Likeable Ordeal, Lumb Bank

My friends describe me as 'a likeable ordeal'
John said, as we conducted introductions.

Andrew poured out the wine.
Alison flashed her eyes.
Graham drew lightning sketches.
Tom read a poem about thighs
(brown ones, well travelled and hairy) .

Harry cooked and cleaned.
Mary thought of her kin,
As the wind rattled and keened.

John, tall as a telephone post, shambled from room to garden,
Wispy as Banquo's ghost.

Your accent's terribly strange I can't catch a word you say,
He informed me matter of factly in his likeable ordeal way.

Up first in the raw morning,
He carried the coal and kindling.
You'd have thought you'd caught him praying,
As he knelt on the stone flags, willing
The flames to live. And lo,
They did... and so, from rug to rafter
The room soon magically filled with simple joy


13.Portrait with Tarot Cards

This portrait is of Miss Catriona Low.
Her life's mapped out.
Her way is crystal clear.
The Tarot pack will tell her where to go.

Her cats are midnight pools.
Their fish eyes glow.
The alchemy of divination's here.
She turns each card, methodical and slow.

Literature, music, cats... a lover too
Inhabit her domain, a ship of air.
The Tarot pack will tell her where to go.