Holocaust Day, 2015

This poem, written after a visit to Theresienstadt/Terezin, in the Czech Republic, was published in Sushi & Chips (Diehard) in 2006.

Where poetry fails

Numbered empty suitcases

stacked in a glass case,

tally with lost numbered owners

who did not need luggage at the terminus.

Children’s drawings on yellowing paper

fill captioned panels in a silent classroom.

I do not read the captions – here

there is no need for explanations.

Matchstick figures for once match up

to skinny reality; hanging bodies

sprang from no artist’s imagination;

the bulging eyes of the witnesses

are swollen from sights

where blindness would be a blessing;

girls wash feet in communal sinks

below the “Wasser sparen!” sign.

Only the water was saved.

A violin, hand-scored music,

more paintings, black ink

the only pigment; poems where hope

is not a word in any tongue. Entartete Kunst.

From the walls of the Fourth Courtyard

jackdaws scold us for entering.

In the Group Cells bare bunks for four hundred

line the walls of a room big enough

for forty tourists. Roof lights

admitted summer heat, winter chill,

allowed enough rain through

to soak the floor. No heat in winter,

even in the cold shower blocks.

Thin rough suits, wet from steam cleaning,

were put on again, on wet cold bodies.

I cannot look in the rusted mirrors

of the Shaving Room, afraid of seeing

my reflection against these walls. This room

built for show, in case the Red Cross inspectors

seriously inspected, was never used, never seen.

Six hours, two spent over lunch,

were enough to convince three chaperoned fools

they had seen a model town, no film set;

a place where happy families

lived in peace and whitewashed freedom.

I will not speak of the instruments used

to extract meaningless confessions,

implicating friends in crimes

never committed.

In the Fortress tunnels the murmurs

of fellow sight-seers diminish

to an indistinct mourn. We imagine smells,

assign meanings to stains whose source

we cannot know. Our eyes move nervously

from a gallows in the firing squad yard,

to strands of old barbed wire.

Outside, a family of silent buzzards

stands in the empty turnip field,

resting between rabbits,

as trees unleaf in the drifting drizzle.

To see this is to share survival.

We bear the guilt for those who cannot,

and the pain for those beyond all pain.

I have no relatives here,

but all its dead are kin

in common humanity.

Wherever I go now,

I will not leave this place.

Colin Will

Foxy poem

Red Runner is the second poem in my first book, Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands, published by Diehard in 1996. It's a nature poem, based around my observations of foxes. I used to see them regularly, in the Bathgate Hills and in the Calder Wood Country Park, when I lived in Bathgate and Mid Calder respectively. I think that with nature poems you have be true to the realities of the nature you're describing, but you also have to go beyond that, to bring in your personal reaction to the natural world, and maybe to make a general point from the particular. Nature poems should never be just about nature. I've gone on to write a lot more nature poems, mostly based on my own experience of creatures and their habitats, but I also think you can bring in your theoretical knowledge. I've never seen siamangs in the jungle, but I've written about them.

Red runner

Beautifully camouflaged, he thinks,

against the bright sprouting wheat,

the spring fox stalks two knowing rooks.

They wait, and lift, crop-forward

into the wind,

and he tailstreams over the field,

pretending indifference,

to the edging trees

in search of an unready vole.

Fail or kill, the habit hones the skill.

I've seen his relations often;

the dog-fox spinning and leaping

in Calder Wood's new snow,

or the vixen who notes and ignores me,

driven by the imperative

of her cubs' hunger.

I'm an irrelevance in a green jacket;

I unleash no terriers.

Or another, panting on a warm rock,

snapping at bluebottles,

guarding her smelly den among the gorse.

Eyes glow in the headlights

as they stand and look at you,

super-foxing towards them,

and too often they are dirty red scraps

flat on the road.

But see him run through the hill's rippling grass,

ears up and tongue out,

intent, fixed, on a swerving quest,

or hear a pair yip on a still November night,

and know you've met a light and lively being,

the essence of pursuit,

that pointed face where fear and fierceness fuse.

Copyright  © Colin Will 1996

A taste of fish

Way back in 1994 I was finding my voice as a poet, maybe a bit over-exuberant in my use of language, and sometimes tying myself in verbal knots as a result. But when it worked I was pleased with the outcome. With a science background, and working as a scientific librarian, I often used my scientific knowledge in poems. So if I was writing about geology, I made sure I got it right; same in biology and chemistry. At that time I used to index science books for publishers, as a wee sideline, and while many of them were geological, my principal subject, I took what was offered. I remember I had been indexing a book about hake - biology and fisheries, and I mentioned to a poet friend that I was a bit fed up with it. 'Write a poem about fish,' she said. So I did, and this is it. It was published in my first collection Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands, And More (Diehard publishers, 1996, and now out of print).

A taste of fish

Husbanding volition in the dark pool,

mouthing and gill-gushing water,

tasting chemical memories

from the birthplace spring,

the home-tang of an imprinting riffle,

the hen salmon’s programmed need proceeds.

Over fear she forces the fall upward,

tail-strokes levered by pink muscles,

flinging her body in a froth-skimming arc

to slither over the lip’s slimed slabs

and flicker through the slick black surge

of the top-water, into the slack.

In a brutal balance,

body is lost to make movement,

nothing else weighs,

oils emulsify to fill yolk sacs,

bones decalcify, deform,

scales tear from spongy skin,

and, in the final finishing

of her blind and battering race,

a felt and tasted presence,

a red need beside her, under, round,

bestows a milky blessing on her generation.

Copyright © Colin Will 1996