Two Poems

Leaving (for JC)

my star magnolia in bud
presides in fisted beauty by the wall

bulbs in the garden spiking through the mud

as black birds call.

Reminders of that other March

my young son packed to leave

burdened with desert camouflage

the garden bursting into leaf

my star magnolia in bud

bulbs in the garden spiking through the mud

Lost (Iraq: March 2003)

There are no maps for poets in this country.
The compass finger, mindless on its post
will not direct us on this dangerous journey.
An unfamiliar landscape tells us we are lost.
Above the bramble and the rambling wood
the wheeling dragons search for bones
of luckless travellers who have misconstrued
the alien symbols on the milestones.
We have nowhere to go but where we are,
our options closed, the exit double locked.
We may not take direction from a star.
The stars are out and all the roads are blocked.
How can we dare this nightmare territory?
the shifting contours of the hills and coasts,
the gibberish signposts and the season's enmity.
What hand our touchstone in this land of ghosts?

Chrys Salt

Poem for a New Year

January 1st

from North Uist

in dawn light

scarce enough

to not distinguish colour

the moon is polishing the sea

Pauline Prior-Pitt

knitted christmas!

(from chrys)

shadows from the greater hill

(photo by mike knowles)

from SHADOWS FROM THE GREATER HILL

Tessa Ransford

DECEMBER 24th

(There is a theory that ‘APOLLO’ denotes a set of concepts and ideas in music, astronomy , geometry and mathermatics which was widespread in the megalithic era, linked to the Druids and later to the Pythagoreans.. The story goes that ‘Apollo’ left the shrine at Delphi in the winter months to dwell among the Hyperboreans. The suggested explanation is that the two constellations, the Lyre and the Swan, associated with Apollo, were more visible in that era in northern lands in winter. Whether the Hyperboreans can be equated with the Hebrideans is a guess, but in his poem I imagine Apollo spending a winter break on Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh, of which I have a perfect view from my flat. This poem is one of a sequence written throughout the year in 1985, looking from my widow.

Apollo winters here;
strings his lyre like stars
through clouds, like swans
brightened in the wind;
practises his geometries
scaled to our particulars,
arcs, crags, promontories.

A coiled, constricted formula
translated into sections of our landscape,
our city-weathered hill;
reduced yet refined
from Delphic drama, grandeur
or golden Minoan harmony;
his circles here, triangles,
his proportions are coded
into our alpha rock,
our liquid sky, diagonal,
and huge, cold, omega winter nights.

Bird Call

As I pulled a leaf from the bay tree, a blackbird,

I imagine the one, who waits by the patio door at dawn,

flew out, calling louder than a car alarm on an empty street.

It’s been that kind of day – only a few hours before

I saw the kingfisher I’d been trying to see for years,

and then two cormorants flew over, a matching pair,

reflecting each other in the mercurial river where

a dipper fluttered and a little grebe dunked below.

I’d have sent you a picture but the light was too good,

each feather, the dazzle, the fright of a waking bird

refuse capture, though they liberate in my memory’s recall.

Hazel Buchan Cameron

Two Autumn Poems

September 13^th 2011

Swifts are dashing into the wind the wild west wind and in streams of sun;

they cry as they fly ‘goodbye goodbye’; this our last day; see you next May’

and gulls and geese are drying their feathers sedately patching the green of the grass and they watch the swifts in their whirl and whisk

and they sigh and nod and continue to stand and stalk and stake their claims to the park;

red leaves for me the wind and the sun now here now gone

October 13^th 2011

Swifts have flown over the hill and far away;

sunlight tries to stay strong and is weaker each day

for as the earth turned at the equinox I too was reversed

and now walk like a tiger, step by stealth, breathing in and out

and chant my way into winter

Tessa Ransford

Two Poems for the Shortening Days

SALAH

My God

Lord of a heaven far away from me there

near to me here

I pray to you there, pray to you here.

Five decades ago there

it was tuneful Azan rang in my right ear

and eight years ago here

I chanted the same Azan

in my new-born baby’s right ear

and showered his cheeks with tears -

one stranger here comforts another.

Mother watches behind a curtain of tears and feels pity for us here

and an astonished midwife with an open mouth gasps:

What on earth are they doing here?

What is he mumbling in the baby’s ear?

dawn, noon, afternoon

sunset and night

each time I pray to the Lord who granted us love, grace and blessing

and poured the light and sap of life into our bodies.

I pray for tranquillity to overwhelm my soul

for the right guidance to flow over all the people in the world.

I pray for mercy to fill my heart

for happiness to rise from my eyes.

There

I returned to the neighbourhood mosque

and recognised some faces that bid farewell to me years ago

and my father’s wasn’t amongst them;

but a corner where he used to pray, perfumed with his breath,

invited me.

I knelt down low and repeatedly pressed my forehead

on what fell from his spirit there

and offered him my tears

and recited the opening verse of the Holy Quran by his grave

for a long time.

I cried for him and also cried for my mourning soul.

Here

in the mosques of the land of frost

I met people who came from all over the world.

Like a rug of a thousand colours

We’ve been unfolded behind the Imam,

a flower from each garden, each has their own tongue

But there is only one language for prayer.

Glorify, saying God is great

for the nation praying to the Lord

who sat on the throne of heaven there

and who sits on the throne of heaven here.

Iyad Hayatleh

‘Prayer’ translated by Iyad Hayatleh with Tessa Ransford.


* * * * * *

The Three Crows

I could recall a nursery rhyme

for one of those,

but not for the three that swooped

between red sandstone tenements

like harbingers.

Magpies are simple:

one for sorrow, two for joy

three for…a crow times three is

darkness threescore:

one for simply being

two for an accomplice, and

three for three’s a crowd.

But in that dip and dive

like the invisible curve of lives

that moves through time’s memory game,

comes a flash of colour:

the rainbow’s elusive sheen on feathers,

something to grasp

before the light changes.

Nalini Paul