Sheena Blackhall Poems

The brass pot is suspended overhead
I must lie still, beneath the scented oil
A neck stand is supplied, a towelled bed
...

The bus stalled at a pot-hole
I watched through the steamed-up window
An old woman pause to squat.
Lifting her colourful sari
...

Moon snags on branches,
Stars are snow seeds
Blown across the black-bull hide of night;
Earth catches paw-prints
...

Into the silent water, slips the silent prow
Lifting the dripping anchor over the tilting bow.

There's no star on the skyline, past the silver moon
...

The citadels of sand rise up
Magnificent and grand:
And every step of crystal glass
Towers up above the years of grass
...

Tho I've never met it, I know that Heaney's pen
Is whimsical. It's got a mind of its own,
One of those lyrical trap door minds
You walk across, and Poof you're in the basement.
...

Hedgehog, the mouse-eared prickle-back breaks cover
His ploughshare nose sheers through the silky grass
His hog-snout scoops up nosegays of the wood
Mould, moistness, mushrooms, drops of moon-made dew.
...

In the middle of the night
Hear the fretful feet of vole
Fox has put a crimson sash
In the velvet side of mole.
...

In the writers' farm I am free-range;
I don't want my eggs in one basket,
I want to be broody in lark's houses,
In hare's forms.
...

I loved to hear him gasp with scared delight
Safe in my grasp, as we slid down the peat
Between the fir tree branches, low with cones
Close to the thundering Falls on angled feet
...