our time of

in our time of unbending

never again in this city
will sea-waves beat on shingle

parts

                        today we have naming of parts…

            …of the body
        a laid-out map
                or on a
        butcher’s slab

Blood Rain

The wet fingerprints

of an ill wind stain
the weather,

fronts of rain,
the blood-red
dust of deserts.

benthos

rain in the depths of the sea
fallen beyond the reach of light

we are the clouds of it

change

windlass

What did we do with the freedom?

What did we do with the freedom
my father bought with six years of his life
and nine hundred miserable miles marching,
a prisoner among prisoners?

soun o sleat

Difference Engine

The engine of difference
runs black or white;

Peregrini

Pilgrims,
passage migrants,
flown-in-the-night,
dark-island birds,

the here-and-gone
shearwaters
take effortless flight
from nests of earth.

Travel

In and out
the country towns,
under a noon sky,

Old Poet

The old poet in my house,

in the years before I found it,
had been someone else
lover, husband, father.

(I suppose)

skins

full ma breeks

Beach Stones

Stone and broken stone,
rock and rounded boulder,
pebbles as curved as an ocean
with the blue of sky fixed
inside them;

Puddens

water resolves

I drew her face

I drew her a face

where invented beauty

washed over nerves and veins
and painted melancholy in her eyes
as if some memory survived
her fruitless dreaming

Howe o Nicht

Moon on the slates,
skitters its flichterin licht

Efterneen

A file yet

till gloaming,
an the streets

Foreneen

Yalla sun ower the reefs,
maks glentin leams o windae gless,
pirlin shafts reflectin aff o hi-rise waas.

Small Wars

Once
it was war,
now only
skirmishes,

small wars,

enrage
the world.

Galtachan

Sea again, slick with treachery,
floods over dark slabs of geology
drags rain and mist back into itself
winds them into knotted planes of water.

Eternitus

The serpent coils about the world,
swallows itself from tail to tongue:
an enigma that feeds itself
upon itself; a fire that burns
but is never consumed.

Iteration

Surfaces decided that my eyes
could never see enough, could not take in
how the light falls and lies
nor see the patterns that light was making.

I remember #10,121

I remember this and that, I remember how it was.

Sedimental

Time drags heavy in the fingers of the sea,
scattered pebbles on the shore,
too random for a human eye to see.
too many to touch, and not long before

wheen

untitle

no name no pack drill
no loss
the poem goes unpublished

another saturday

another

Saturday night
and I ain’t got nobody

April

April hid hope
among its cruelties,
promised change,
slow to settle
as the yellow grass
unbent.

March

Wind on the bay,
force six and rising,
beating the narrows
where the island slopes
to cliff-edge margins:
bare rock over water
as deep as sky,
as grey as the gale.

continuance

night follows day

as sure as the cloud
that was once in heaven
descends

Souls in bright homes

Souls

in bright homes

cook tomorrow

from the day’s last scraps.

Wakent bi Moonlicht

I saa the Tay Brig streetch

wi naethin but hills ayont
an the stobs o the brig afore
like rottet wallies in the draig.

Syne the meen

Beats

Yeah,

and the beats, man,
the groove was good.

belated birthday

birthday
birth date
birth 

of a legendary
son-of-a-gun

mask

      the mask slips
   (as I breathe out)
      the world slides
   (as I breathe in)

Winter Light

Snow confines the earth,
colours it not entirely white

but with refracted shades,
blue with cold, breathless.

City of Tiny Lights

November night rolls up the moon;

street-lit clouds leach away the light;

something resembling starlight shakes a fist;

incandescence shines like neon saints 

converging in a sky of little rain.

every word a meaning

every word a meaning 

a shade a shadow a scrawl on a wall
unpunctuated graffiti overstretched tense
slogans on billboards jumped-up letters tortured sense

souls

crowded souls

drifting and confined
against the gates of heaven
wait quietly for the afterlife

Compute the Sorrow

Add up the dead and dying,

Damn right;
Numbers only lie in pieces
Approximated in plain sight.
A room full of statisticians
Say, “There’s margin of error here…”
With whole percentages of tears
Running down the faces left alive.

All Things

We can be anything and everything

but time is against us;

we open the door to possibility
and find an empty room;

we write the story of our future and still
the page we write on is blank.

We are everything and nothing.

© BH, 2021

---

Another fragment from the past - or else an invention misremembered. Who’s to say. I’ve been dredging through old writings so the former is a possibility. But I can’t find a manuscript where the original might reside. Whatever, it’s much changed and maybe it’s a sign of the times and time passing.

Hey ho.

a poem once

I wrote 

a poem
on lined paper

     a poem begun
     too long ago
     in a time before

Every 3rd Word

brumaire

Mastery

Initiae sapientiae timor domini.

        Fear of the Lord
dried out our wisdom;
fear of God, the bowed head,
the eyes averted, feet of clay.

I dinna ken…

          I dinna ken 

if Scavie’s livin yet, nor Dites Antonio,

nor Charlie Shrites.