Poems

Over the years I’ve had the temerity to write some poems. None of them are up to much, but they might as well be here as anywhere.

This first one, written in August 1999 at the Baha’i Academy for the Arts (a wonderful event), was an attempt at a haiku-type verse.

BLUE VASE FALLING
Falling vase, blue china
Midway from heaven to earth
From one to many
A relationship ends.

Here’s another poem made at the same time.

BUDDHA STATUE
Buddha – God or enlightened man?
Ancient pitted oriental bronze.
Long, curved eyes half closed –
Blind or seeing?
Long-lobed ears looped round –
Deaf or hearing?
Do those rounded lips
Sneer or smile?

This one emerged on a dank and melancholy winter day that somehow reminded me of my prep school. I can’t put a date on the poem

IT’S THAT KIND OF DARK DAY
It’s that kind of dark day
When the dank gets into the bones
And reminds me of days at school -
Playing-fields and rugby balls that come from nowhere
To make one run and run and fall,
Tackled by a heavy forward,
The breath knocked from my lungs
And the ball wrenched from my feeble grasp.

That’s how life is, that is!
Things that come from dark nowhere,
Unlooked for and unwanted,
Defying understanding and demanding action.
I run and run and fall,
Tackled by a heavy accusation,
The thoughts knocked from my brain
And ideas from my feeble mind.

I throw the ball and the dog runs wide.
The leafless bush stands darkly, dankly threatening.
Autumn is here, middle age and, following that, winter.

And talking of my prep school, here is a poem about days at Nevill Holt, which is what the school was called. It’s long since stopped being a school and Nevill Holt, a historic house overlooking the Welland valley in Leicestershire, has reverted to private ownership. I cannot recall when I wrote the poem

DAYS OF NEVILL HOLT
Days of Nevill Holt
Clattering across the road in rugby boots
Studs slip on tarmac
And then into the warren
That mysterious field with dips and hollows
Where we played cops and robbers
In the summer evenings.

But now it’s rugger days
On the cold pitches
The ironstone quarry machines rattle & grind
The lorries come and go just outside the Avenue gates
That freedom direction
And I’m stuck in the third game
Reds versus Blues
And balance with Miss Barge.

The final poem in this particular selection was also written at the Arts Academy in 1999. It welled up after I’d been struggling to write anything and is deeply rooted in my love for Shetland, where Erica and I lived from 1974 to 1984. We could sit in the kitchen of our house on the island of Trondra and see the Clift Hills across the Clift Sound, an arm of the Atlantic that separated our little island from the Shetland mainland.

Trondra School House, much transformed from how it was in our day

CLIFT HILLS, SHETLAND
A cold still day in winter, snow on scattald.
For the moment no wind blows
And the dark sea’s surface lies mirror still,
Reflecting glass for the dark Clift Hills.
To the north stands Trondra bridge
And, beyond that, Scalloway –
Pier, castle, houses, fish factories -
Rotting fishgut smell that drives down on bitter northwind squalls.

But not today.
Today it’s still, no smell, the only sounds
A mewing maalie
And a passing car, Burra-bound.

South lies Wester Quarff,
White houses huddle
By the West Voe’s shore
Facing out Atlantic gales.

But here, by my Trondra house, I see
Across the dark reflecting Sound
Dun hills double, foot to foot,
Their sea-twins’ heights so darkly seen.
Two lonely crofts, roofless, long-empty, haunt those hills.
Absent lairds and rapacious merchants,
Evicted crofters from their precarious land –
Lives shallow-rooted like grass on stony soil,
But tenacious, tough as heather on the peat bank.

A moment clearly seen
Before a sudden snow squall
Funnels down the Tingwall Valley
And veils us from Scalloway, bridge, ruined crofts,
Bare hills, lost lives.

All poems copyright ? John Barnabas Leith
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