The Mongolian Spot Et Al (11 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.The Museum of Curious Objects, San Marino

Loiter in St Marino’s curious museum
Admire Venetian aristos’ platform shoes
Stilt-walker high, should flood tides try to wet them

Eureka! A watch to wear at the end of your nose
Come, gawp at glasses made for cross eyed people
A petrol-powered hair drier that stinks and blows

Moustache cups, neat for moustaches spired like a steeple
(Dali’s variety’s Spanish, most Surreal
Chaplin and Hitler- a toothbrush under each nostril

Captured minds and hearts with their crowd appeal
Neitzche sported a gloomy walrus outgrowth
Stalin’s handlebars showed a face of steel
Oh, the pencil moustaches of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable
Made ladies sigh and swoon beneath the table!

A flea trap might possibly catch your fleeting eye
The world’s largest crab, or the tallest man
An umbrella whip for a carriage, nice and spry

The world’s longest nails were Indian
Shridhar Chillal, his nails like spirals curling.

See the weird electric device, a cunning plan
Stopping teenage boys from masturbating

Madonna’s credit card’s absent…an omission
The Elephant’s man’s own items can’t be found
No Dennis the Menace comic. No magician
Such as Houdini’s props, all world renowned

You’ll find no Jack the Ripper’s relics here
But much that’s weird, mysterious and queer


2.Summer
Hiccupping frogs land in the palm of the earth
Under poppies, red as stigmata

Two snot filled boys on a bench
Swop punch-lines, secrets, scabs

Wasps suck on the cherry tree’s nipples
Honesty’s wearing its lacy summer frock

How much blue can one sky hold
Before the darkness comes?


3.(for Manjusvara)
There is only one human story: it ends in leaving
That summer I cupped my hands
To catch the mellifluous wisdom of bees

An eagle soared over Loch Voile
But no-one noticed

It set you in its sight
Coming, ready or not it croaked,
In the playtime speech of childhood

The day was perfect in that hilly, happy land
Glimmering with petals and birds
The dappled grass, bright with jade green beetles
You couldn’t have picked a better day to die


4. Into Darkness
I walked one night beneath the winter stars
The frosty dews of dark lay wet and grey
Where the sick moon looked ghastly on the wood
As if a death-blow might unseat its sway

And every thought was chilly as the loch
Where Malachi became the black reed’s catch
An innocent, one slip and all was done
The water swallowed him in one quick snatch

I had forgotten him until that hour
Loss brings its own attendants, grief and pain
We get one crack at youth, its shining days
And life, once spilled does not return again


5.Finlay
Finlay the cat is an author
He has oodles of ‘Je ne sais quoi’
He features on poetry book covers
With a studious air of sang-froid

At readings, a most astute critic
Although he appears to be dead
He is listening to each single cadence
As a poet, he’s very well read

If he thinks a performance is gruelling
He stalks from the room quite aloof
With his tail held as stiff as a poker
While rolling his eyes to the roof

He’s been heard to purr loudly at Ginsberg
Walt Whitman, Chrys Salt and Ted Hughes
But beware of his claws during rappers
On which he holds quite catty views

His approach is quite concrete and visual
He’s been praised for his flair and his nowse
In the garden, it’s quite elegiac
The way he unwraps a dead mouse

Yes, Finlay the cat is a poet
A cat melancholic, true Gael
But to book him, you must use his agent
Otherwise he’ll say ‘talk to the tail’


6.The Commonwealth
What is the Commonwealth? Who Lives there?
54 Countries, Hot and Cold
Rich and poor lands, wet and dry
Some of them new and others old

All speak English, all are friends
We meet together from hills and plains
Commonwealth nations it’s Scotland’s turn
This year, to welcome them for the Games

India, Kenya Australia, Wales
New Zealand, Canada, just a few
Of Commonwealth nations round the world
Some of their tales we’ll share with you


7.The Hungry School
Everyone’s heard of the Hungry School
It isn’t clever, it isn’t cool
Middleton Park will show the way
To keep it trim in an eco-way
Plastic bottles should stay together
Recycle them all whatever the weather
At dinner time please don’t fill your plate
With things you’ll leave that you really hate

Keep your paper to use again
Reusing scores ten out of ten
Turn off the computer, switch off the light
That is the rule to get things right
Work together to save the planet
If you see waste be sure to ban it


8.Ode to a Mongolian Spot
Has your child a Mongolian spot?
A bruise or a stain it is not
It is smoky and blue
As a violet, it’s true
But it’s only a birthmark she’s got!


9.Poem Inspired by the sculpture of Jackie Kay, a bronze head by Michael Snowden

Red Bordeaux
It’s not the knee, it is the heart that’s grazed
By words like sticks and stones, flung at the pane
Of a Scots childhood. Racist chants declaim
That pink or white’s the colour to be praised
So thoughts must stray where lion cubs are raised,
Such twists along the DNA blood-chain
And yet, and yet, the Scots words came to sain
An soothe the cot where that loved child was lain

Identity, lost paths, lost tongues those themes
All in that fertile mind, find space to grow
Lost love, the winds that scatter infant dreams
The child birth parents did not choose to know
Like grapes, from pitch-black earth, comes red bordeaux


10.Poem Inspired by the Installation The Rowan is Learning to write.
The Rowan is Learning to Write: photograph by Robin Gillanders from a stone in Little Sparta, the garden of the sculptor, Ian Hamilton Finlay

The rowan is learning to write.
Her leaves are moving shadows,
Like bird plumes etching a stone

The rowan is learning to write
Her berries are commas
Pausing between the winds
The rowan is learning to write
Italics, of course,
She is composing a charm
To banish witches


11.The House of the Russian Dolls
Two jigsaw pieces dropped behind the bed
A teddy posted through the scanner lid
A lollipop in fluff beside the fridge
A bin that’s full of nappies, poems, junk mail

Cuddles with two wriggling giggling toddlers
Snail-trail of incense by the household Buddha
Tiny handprints patterning the windows
A trampoline beneath the drying washing

Four redundant smoke free chimneypots
A bumble bee zigzagging, drunk on dew
Three ghosts of hamsters live beneath the hedge
A three-legged tom cat spraying April’s daffs

Two glossy magpies eyeing up the kitchen
A jar of thirsty dandelions drinking
Chopsticks drying by the knives and forks
Baby squid as small as Quan Âm’s tears *

Daughter-in-law combs down her Zen black hair
A plastic duck is bobbing in the bath
My grow-up son recovers my lost glasses
Alex Salmond smiles from the TV

Time’s turned me into a slowly plodding tortoise
Uplifted by the joyful whoops of children

*Quan Âm is the Vietnamese Goddess of Compassion