Of Woodlands, Puberty, Norway (19 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1. Far, far from People-Land

At the end of the street, across the road
Behind a crumbling wall
The snow lies soft, untrodden white
The firs stand dark and tall
The moon is bright as diamonds there
The stars climb up his glittering stair
And only the night owls call

Oh, often I cross from people-land
Where the air is charred and sour
To enter the forest's secret ways
Where the hermit heron stands in praise
Of the nervous deer come down to graze
By the silver river's strand

At the end of the street, across the road
The air is cold and clear
A single breath is a cloud of mist
In the darkest days of the year
The tiny robin's crimson breast
Burns like a flame that dare not rest
Where the fox's sharp eyes peer

They're close as the hollow of my hand
Those woods all muffled with snow
Where the song thrush flutters his frozen wings
Lifts his head to the clouds and sings
To the quiet trees which hear such things
Far, far from people-land


2. Mrs Lion's Culinery Tips

Eating brains is messy.
Human juices are sticky on the paws

Skull crackers such as nearby stones are helpful,
But I prefer a single swinging blow
Break the skull in two with a twisting motion

Now, it should look like a coconut shell,
I assure you, a perfect bowl

Some lions season the raw brain with saliva,
An optional relish I do not recommend

Scoop it from the skull to savour at your leisure
As fur the meat, let it be rare as possible
Failing which, let maggots tenderize it


3.Loch Muick as an Ironing Board

Wintry Loch Muick is an ironing board
Spread with white linen,
A little dusting of starch for stiffening
Frost stands hunched for hours
Flattening its waves and crinkles into submission

In summer, the Loch wears water crumpled
Risking the censure of faddists, the anti-crinklers
I suspect it's happier creased and lumpy


4.VIP suite Pittodrie Stadium

A button switches the crowd-noise on or off
Here, the Neros of Enterprise
Cocooned from Arctic breezes
Watch the footie.
Nobody Spits or tramples on their turf.


5.The House with the Gun

One neighbour had a high-powered red lawn mower
Sawing its way through smothered summer days

Every time Jane went to watch the earwigs
Crawling from the nasturtiums, higgledy-plop
He carted out the thing to shear the grass.

The Johnstones, two doors off, played Band of Hope
Tubular angel music, goose-step brass
The woman across the cobbles had a Yorkie
Snapping and yapping moments into shreds

But Jane's house had a gun, her father's treasure.
It stopped the rabbit's shriek,
It stilled the quilted pheasant's plumping breast
Often she loaded and primed it with her mind
The screeching lawn-mower bleeding pools of oil
The yapping Yorkie, dead in a snarl of red.


6.Woodland Burial: Angus Calder 1942-2008

Today your face was everywhere
In the tilt of a daughter's jaw
The flop of a son's hair.

I think you were standing a little way behind
Watching, as young men shouldered your white box
Shoulder-high through the light-green summer trees

You entered the healing earth to a choral sigh
Sent on your way with a woodwind song and a poem
Only the dram was missing and that came later

It was a perfect day for cricket.
No Greek wailing. No Celtic keening.
Nobody tore their breasts, their arms, their clothes
None of your former loves clawed rival faces.

A speckled thrush adjusted his civic waistcoat
Cleared his throat and welcomed you to his home.
You lie near a row of Polish generals
And a gravestone inscribed MacDonald
The Lewis equivalent of Smith

We should warn them, you'll test their mettle,
Already I hear the clack of curling stones
The rustle of manuscripts in the thin air.


7.Mr Bird (Paolo Uccello 1396-1479)

Odd, melancholy, solitary man,
Mr Bird loved painting hides, hooves, wings.

Falcons, dogs and deer dripped from his brush
His bestiary became a virtual flood
Of hares, hounds, hunting horses' swishing tails
Crossbows and bridles, golden, crescent moons
Oranges on trees, roses in battles.
(For roses still bloom beautifully near blood)

His ladies were as cold as Greta Garbo,
Florentine women, haughty, jewelled, human
Their nipples hard, as if with frozen milk
Dangerous breasts in bodices of silk
Plucked eyebrows, pony tails with rough, split ends

His dragons looked as though they'd like to roar
With indignation at the gore they'd shed
As if to say to prodding knights 'How dare you! '
Their sides, like open doublets, flushed with red.

All night he stayed up, practising perspective
Only alive inside art's wonderland
Leaving his wife to twist frustrated sheets
Play with her rosary, or woo her hand.

Critics, baffled, called him idiosyncratic
Mr Bird, long-bearded like a goat
Who else would paint blue pastures as a protest
Because his abbot-patron fed him cheese?

Cheese pies, cheese soup, a plague on mozzarella!
He said until they fed him normal meals
His scenery would be as queer's his meat.

Such patrons! The Medici wanted beast-fights,
And other snips of jungle tit for tat
Making a glory out of violent death

The Deluge...the Creation...Noah's Ark
A nestful of egg tempera, linseed oil
No time for family matters, day's chit-chat
No wonder that his girl became a nun.

Ten years before he died, his tax return
Stated 'I'm old and ailing, my wife's ill,
I can no longer work.' A bitter pill
In his last years, poor Mr Bird was moulting
A shrunken, feeble, coffin-cold crossbill


8.Love Letter to Mr Spock

Dear Mr. Spock,
You're always right.
I love your ears, your trousers, tight
And when I fall asleep each night
I dream that you and I take flight
Aboard U.S.S. Enterprise
I'd cross your Ts and dot your Is

Sleek Vulcan, master of `geek chic'
I could mind-merge with you all week
McCoy's a plod, Scotty's a bam
Plump Captain Kirk is an old ham
His corset's straining at the seams
His make-up runs in sweaty streams

Live-long and prosper's your advice
Some think your sang-froid is a vice
Cool Mr Spock, your ice is nice


9.Rainy Ballater

Listen. The grass is growing. Small trout leap in the Dee
This is Eden, where geans plump into ripeness
Whether you like it or not
Where rain hammers golf rounds into the ground
Whether you like it or not

The kirk has wrung her tiny bell near dry
Calling the faithful to prayer.
Rain has filled each shop with unbelievers
A soggy gull in pink umbrella feet
Plaps over concrete like a comic Chaplin
A thrush is wearing its beak like a baseball cap

In canvas city, by plink-plonk caravans
Family tents are igloos of resignation
Of those marooned in muggieness

Sticklebacks, belly-upwards, cook in jars
Bedraggled dogs haul owners in search of papers,
Car tyres spray the wet like ptarmigans' tails
Puddles are making Olympic hoops of raindrops
Lochnagar has closed his grey net curtains

In B&B land, umpteen genteel couples
Stare over their P.C. continental breakfast
(The toast in perfect pyramids,
Elegant folded napkins set by the china ducks)
Out at the drizzle weaving Gaelic mist
Tufty the squirrel, drunk on the joy of summer
Forgets her Highway Code
Dices death with a BP petrol tanker


10.Snowball Moon

Tonight the moon was a snowball.
Cars slithered like snakes
Over roadways rutted like ladders
I saw a poem with a red breast
Bob under a car
Its shadow, a blob of ink.


11.Winter Train

Like dragging a knife over a wedding cake
The train slices through ice

The sky is a cloud of lilac,
Violet and white, under a trembling veil

Like rows of sleepy badgers,
Cars lie humped inside their snow-striped pelts

Roads are a grey salt lick,
Sprinkled with brown sugar

Passing graffiti's confetti flung upon pastel grey,
In this land of stamping elks and growling bears
With here and there
The tiny tracks
of birds


12.At the Airport

Quick as a colt from its holster
Out they whip them
People on mobile phones.

They are pouting, tapping their knees
Crooking their necks
Phone trapped between neck and shoulder

A mother and son are sitting together politely
Both grimace at a small Italian boy

A real firecracker. Kicking his limbs around
Like a Power Ranger. Setting the hackles up
Of a grumpy stranger.

He has an audience now. He grows more daring
A tumbler, leap-frogger, BOOM he's a falling bomb
WHEECH he's a Kung Fu warrior!

Marco! Marco! His mother sighs...But he's not for taming.
He's off to explore.
What's under that lady's seat?
Behind that exit door?
His imagination is boundless,
Beyond parental restraining


13.Winter Street, Oslo

A pigeon, not wearing its thermals
Is winnowing paper bags where street lamps glow
Children with hair pale as wheat, booted and hatted, go-slow

Padded out with clothes like small salt shakers
They slidder and stomp on the ice.
It is – 20 below.

An avalanche drops from a roof, surprising a hedge
Frost has cocooned the fir trees in furry ermine.
It is so, so, cold. It's like breathing inside a fridge
The night sky's indigo.

Pavement, gutter and road
Have blurred their boundaries
Small glaciers cover the tram-lines
Toddlers waddle around like small, fat penguins
Swaddled like mummies.
An icicle Hangs from the tip of a baby's dummy

The breeze has dropped to a wheeze.
A pensioner leaves her breaths behind her
Tired clouds, resting. This is the Big Freeze.
Her cheeks are like frozen dough

A very Norse raven, flaps its inky banner
A bus glides by. It is a cold ice floe
Cars slide like hearses, silent, ominous.
The sky is heavy, weighted down with snow.


14.Sneezy Scandinavia

From hairy Norse noses and svelte Japanese
From any direction may come a huge sneeze
Of epic proportions, as if Thor was blowing
A snotty wet blizzard, germ-laden and growing.

No hygenic hand is clapped over the mouth
Swine-fever is wafted from North, East & South
And next, an Atishoo explodes, all defiled
With drops of green gunge from some Gruffalo's child
When it smears its phlegm over its sleeve, mum says 'Bless him'
When all that you're wanting to do is distress him
With nose plugs of concrete to block his excretions
Or posting him off to the Poles or Silesians

Why is it that people with colds seek to share
Every whizzle and snort with the neighbouring air?
Their hankies are horridly soggy and sopping
Their voices like ratchets, their coughing eye-popping
Oh why can't they shiver and shudder at home?
Why don't folk with flu-bugs like being alone?


15.Observed Behaviour at an Airport

A couple sit down at the flight gate
Warmly dressed in top ski-labels. They chat in German
Or rather, she does, he listens.

Off she strides. She is going to Sort something out.
He rises to film an aircraft
Parked on the runway...a version
Of train-spotting. Twitcher of sky-ware.
Exciting to mainstream women
As studying the anatomy of a hoover

A predatory female approaches. Mutters a question in German.
Hoping to fan the flame
Of non-acquaintance into something warmer.
She 000s and aaas into his camera viewer
Feigns interest, pupils widening, Lips ajar.
Hangs on his words Like a butterfly on a petal, with
Lightly fluttering lashes. Things are Progressing nicely.

His girlfriend re-enters the scene
The camera shrivels, pulls its head in
Slides back down in its case
The triangle collapses,
A tripod, knocked off its perch.


16.New Year's Eve, Oslo

People are patting each other down
Tucking each other in
Battening down the hatches
Of Parkas and ski suits

A girl in quilted turquoise
Is mining a quarry of large frost crystals
To pelt her yelping friends

Folk defrost in steamy buses
Like trussed up broilers

Trees and bushes groan under acres of snow
Street lamps wear white busbies
Over their primrose faces
Cars are anchored in bays and inlets of snow

It's cold enough to hold a bonspeil ceilidh
Football pitches are ice rinks where gulls go skating
Two bikes, like surfers, are breasting tides of snow.

Pensioners crawl like snails, braving the slithers
Fearing fractures and metal pins in shattered withers.

A crow hopscotches over a polar landscape
The cold is searing. Drivers skid along roads

This is the white season.
The sky is a floating sea of mother of pearl
A salmon and lemon lake glides under an opaque cloud
The land lies like a corpse, under a stiffening shroud


17.Stuffed Bear, Thon Bristol Hotel, Oslo

Round from the library bar
Where journalists pump their guests for information
The stuffed Norwegian bear gives nothing away

I am told he is very old. He is just my height.
Where his heart should be I see a rectangular tear

His small brown eyes look into the middle distance
Facing his final moment.
He looks distinguished, a Russia diplomat in his coat of fur
His beard is Freudian. His claws could be those
Of a Moor, or a swarthy count.

He stands on a marble floor that's sea-green as a Nordic fjord
A powerful train shunted into a disused siding

If you took this bear to bed, Baboushka
He'd hug you to death. None of the bar-room beauties
Will kiss him awake.


18.Adios to the Noughties

Madonna like a stick insect going orphan-hunting
George Galloway on all fours purring and a-miewing
Subo from West Lothian a-pouring out her voice
Harry Potter movies were the teenie punters' choice

Rebecco Loos got personal and fruity with a boar
Jude Law shagged his nanny in a step too far
Moss, Winehouse, Docherty, were sniffing up the coke
Burrell in the jungle eating gunk to make you choke

Tiger hit a hole in one. He ended in the rough
Heather Mills McCartney told the world she'd had enough

Jordan had her boobs enlarged and later had them trimmed
Britney Speirs went bald, then fat, then settled down & slimmed
Posh Spice ate a burger...folk thought she was in the club
A trophy winning actress couldn't speak just barely blub

Barack Obama won the president election
The economic crisis brought a Credit Crunch recession

Sex in the City thrived, Michael Jackson died
There were terrorist atrocities performed world wide

There was global pandemic, there was British MPs greed
Is life going down the plughole? Is it running down to seed?
Oh it's goodbye to the Noughties...they were anything but nice
Full of Jedward-type nonenties and the slosh of melting ice.!


19.Puberty (Edvard Munch, Oslo Gallery)

Tugging against the blood-tide pulled by the moon
She is facing the death of childhood.
The future is bleak and frightening
The shadow of her doppleganger tries to cut itself free

Her body's become the enemy.
She sits like a city occupied by an enemy

These changes are not for the best
She can not kiss her father
Or be left alone with men.

She is a woman now
Her body bleeds
The Future's a thorny path
Beasts snuffle through the tangled undergrowth