Heron

for Sheena

I come back to you again,

ocean-ankled, a long line

from leg to neck, a right

angle, half-pick head

all gaze and calculation

from black crest

                                                Dylan-doffed cap

                                                mid the briny bells

                                                of sea shells

                        to yellow spear.

Somewhere, out of my sight

there’s an eye, and, Picasso’d over face,

another, each rigid in bone circlets;

each admiring the tide’s lapping advance,

a twice-daily fish delivery system.

You notice me, and jut precedes stretch,

a deliberate step to firmer ground,

squat-thrust bounce into air,

and slow wing-beats,

                                                an old man

                                    shaking invisible rain

                                    from two stiff umbrellas.

It wasn’t you, but by the mill

another coasted out from

the stream’s tree line -

                                    nest-breaker,

                                    egg-scrambler,

                                    chick-gobbler.

It’s all true, not subject

to haughty denial,       which you don’t,

or dismissive flap. True too

that your home stinks

that you dismember frogs

and leave their quartered guts

and egg-masses by the pond-side

slaughterhouse,

that you kill heronry trees

with your toxic shit.

But I’m no judge        no-one can be, black cap or not.

Your feathers are grey variants, subtle -

no flashing gaudy plumes -

shading off, a mistless misting out

as a cloud unblues the sea.

I’ve seen you make

the perfect catch

                                    the stab, shake,

wash and swallow technique,

masterful. But not today; today

the water is cold, and the shoals

of silver-finned tinies are not running.

Spaced out, a family dysfunctions

along the Cove rocks

                                    barnacled limestone ribs

four hundred yards apart. The youngster

                                    skittish kid

takes less time to pause and ponder

than his ponderous parents

                                    moving with the fast crowd,

                                    noisy,

                                    between shriek and croak,

                                    fish-frightener,

but speed won’t last. Soon enough

he’ll signal, slow.

You are still, the perfect waiter;

long after I become impatient

stand, stretch, your cold stare

continues.

You were here when I arrived

but I see you go.

Left behind, in soft sand,

four long toe-tracks, the rear one

                                    offset.

Colin Will

26/04/04

Published in Sushi & Chips, Diehard Press, 2006

Bog cotton

One of my poems in Scots. I don't write in Scots as often as I maybe should, but I'm pleased with this one. It was published in The Propriety of Weeding (Red Squirrel Press, 2012)

Bog cotton

Wrappit in ma downie canach sark

Ah feel nae win, nor fear nae cauld.

A kin o girss, ye say?

Ae silky tassle, snaw-bricht,

bends wi the warslin westers

an chitterin northlies

bit stauns abin the muir,

nae heich, nae sae heich

as hae them pu’ed oot.

Some fite flags is no

fur giein up, bit gauin oan.

Colin Will

08/02/2009

Petrichor

I was at Matt MacDonald's launch of his new book of poems, Petrichor, today. He asked the audience if anyone knew what the word meant, and I said yes, having been told the word when Eleanor Livingstone and I were representing Scotland at an international poetry festival in Lithuania. I wrote a poem inspired by the experience, and it was published in The floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe in 2010.

Petrichor
for Eleanor

Harsh cries from the trees, troll and ogre visions,
idylls, nightmares, signless tracks, waterbirds, frogs
pumping grunge for a zippy dragonfly.

The wind drops; sky is painted colourless;
woods fill with sudden mosquitoes
a nearby smoker’s fumes don’t dispel.

Sound of coalescing drops on plastic roof,
monoblocs darken. There must be a name
for the smell of first rain on warm stone.

Soil absorbs the early drops,
liquid films particles, begins to flow
through interstitial space.

Plant roots extend tentative hairs,
probe initial water, test its extent,
uncommitted, pending proof of shower’s half-life.

Everybody says it’s needed, s’been too long dry,
but there’s a sense of something ending:
not summer, but sunny certainties.



Colin Will
Alausyne, Lithuania, 14:06:08
Published in The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café, Red Squirrel Press, 2010

Fife coastal walk

Fife Coastal Walk

These poems were inspired by stages of the Fife Coastal Walk, undertaken in 1997 and 1998. They were later published in issues of Fife Lines. 

1. Elie to St Monans

The approval of seals

Today we’ll be sea-things;
you’ll be a seal and I’ll be
a different seal. We’ll
swerve and flash
through the kelp stipes,
trailing silver bubble-trains
from our flipper-tips.

What’s the seal-doing word?
Cavort - that’s it - seals cavort
like no other creatures.
Do sloths cavort?
No, sloths brummage in the branches,
with their moths.
Dromedaries lollop,
while elephants proceed.

Only we seals cavort,
having the grace and wit
to enjoy seal-ness,
the sea’s beanfeasts,
and its scope for frolic.

Above, in silhouette against the blue,
a shag whisks the waves to soft peaks,
thrashing feathers back into line.

Shoreward we hear
the fizzing rattle of pebbles
in the wave’s backwash.

Being seals we live only now,
where the word is made fish.
The past is a tablet of overwritten dreams,
and we cheerfully ignore
the abyssal darkness
where a fear-filled future upwells.

Colin Will
9 March, 1997
St Monans

2. St Monans to Anstruther

Marigold

Bobbing beside the moored scampi-boat

an orange rubber glove floats finger-up;

a hand raised from the deep, in greeting or despair.

The sea moves it in a mermaid’s wave,

gently rising, gently falling, turning,

but always with the wrist hidden.

I’m almost sure it’s empty,

but the drowned have many tricks

to teach an old sea-dog.

Perhaps the strings that shift the fingers

stretch far down to bone claws

clutching at lost air.  Perhaps.

Colin Will 

25 March 1997

Anstruther

3. Anstruther to Crail

The stone harmonium

Once waves planed a cliff

from ancient dunes,

then joints were quarried, cracks caved

by the sea’s suspended grit,

grinding weaknesses between blocks,

stacks cleft to the open sky.

As the land rose,

freed from the weight of winter,

the stone ribs stood free,

one pierced with a perfect port-hole

for the wind’s whistle

to blow grains to grow new dunes.

The codes for lovers and haters

adorn the platy walls of this alfresco gallery -

Lascaux in language -

but where bull or bison diagrammed for ritual,

now shapes of hearts and body parts

promote a baser magic.

It won’t last.  Weather will erase,

and like the transient smoke we saw

from the derelict cottage chimney,

and then did not see,

the rocks too are temporary

in landscape’s timescales.

Colin Will

Caiplin Caves, near Crail

March 29, 1997

4. Crail to Fife Ness

The physics of fishing

An eider arrows over the waves.
In the depths below the bobbing floats
Heisenberg’s lobsters may, or may not,
lurk in each weighted pot.

The uncertainty is resolved
when Schrödinger gaffs
the suspended line, reels in,
and curses every stolen bait
and empty creel,
in the manner of all Fife fishermen,
then plouters home through the swell
to poison his cat.


Colin Will

Fife Ness21/09/98

All poems Copyright © Colin Will, 1997, 1998, 2018

The flowers of Scotland

I wrote this in 1997, and presented it to the Botanical Society of Scotland. It was later published as a poem card.

The Flowers of Scotland; a personal field-trip
by Colin Will

To the upward limits of the land
there is green, there is growth.

In the depths of the blackest lochs
skeins of cells float on thermal contours.

In between, layers of life profess
the goodness of sun, and wind, and rain.

Ice shaped the uplands,
filing mountains to points
or chiselled ridges
on which the distance balances.

In summer, on Schiehallion,
cloudberries ramble over the quartzite cobbles,
before the winter-whitened ptarmigan
peck over the snow crust, scavenging seeds.

The calc-schists of Ben Lawers
are over-grazed by sheep (and botanists),
and on the one way up
peat-slopes are cut to slurry
by tourist trainers.

Luckily once, the wrong path up Cruach Ardrain
revealed a field of saxifrages,
not known to unlost walkers.

On the high moors, soil and grass
scab the tops of rock outcrops
where rabbits bob and sentinel.

Wrens flit in archipelagos of gorse,
yellow-edged, and dead-centred;
flowers verging with the trefoils
while track-side whin-pods pop in the heat.

A ewe gives a mother-worried bleat
to her hidden daughter
cropping grass between the junipers.
Their meadow is dimensioned by orchids
and fanned by butterflies
rushing for thyme.

A hoodie stalks the crag’s grey summit
then glides in the updraught
to a rowan perch -
an outpost of his circuit.

Moss and fine grasses
flush the larch-wood’s floor
between cast branches
with their grey crusts of lichen.

Deeper in, ferns feather the clearings
where each toadstooled hump
conceals a tripping stump.
Blaeberry patches smother unplanted outcrops
in green and reddening leaves on wire stems.

The pine’s green candles relax and darken
as the needles wax.
Old trees are many-branched,
like Caledonian menorahs
under rounded crowns.

Coppiced oak woods
yielded stripped bark
for tanning leather.
What’s left, neglected,
are shaky poles, thin growth,
feebly-rooted, or rotted
into woodpecker drum-holes.

Alder’s roots, knotted with nitrogen,
flushed clean by the spring flood
exposed at summer’s ford
where we back-packed the kids,
freezing feet sliding
on the slippery boulders.

As the stream’s course swivels
the trees are undercut
until a final blow
will topple them into the burn.

Green hair streams in the shallows
as if a vegetable Rapunzel
lies entowered below the waterline.

The soft bells of water over rocks
die to the silent power
of the broadening river
pushing to the sea.

On the islands
the machair’s multi-jewelled blanket
is Hebrides Heaven
for ascended larks.

Down south, behind the dune slacks,
sea-holly prickles picnickers’ toes
as their baggage brushes ragwort skeletons
cinnabarred with caterpillars.

On the flats, beyond green banks
which bolster and bend the water’s flow,
mud-plants, sea-rinsed, grow green skins
like paints on a black and smelly canvas.

Kelp throngs the surging sea-front;
tugged from every side
its living glue holds it fast
as the slow waves of the moon’s weight
raise continents of water daily, nightly.

Free-floating aggregates of organelles
pump sunlight into sugars
below the surface turbulence,
making a crop which turn
the world’s cycles of air and earth.

The true ‘Flowers of Scotland’
are the landscapes where they grow.
Plants have no tongues to tell
their provenance;
no patriotic theme-songs
twist through the thistles,
and nationality is more arbitrary,
than climate, latitude, or soil.

They are here because
this is where their seeds fell
and found favour,
spreading the green stain of life
over Scotland’s bedrock.


Copyright © Colin Will 1997, 1998, 2018

Seven Scottish plants

Seven Scottish plants

Armeria maritima

Thrift is the star of the machair,
scattering pink balls of bloom
which jump from spiky tufts.
Don’t be miserly -
spend on thrift.
It needs no sailor-songs
or sea-salt seasoning,
but dry land suits it
once it’s beached.


Fragaria vesca

To gather wild strawberries in the woods
you need a very small basket, my dear.
Easier to bring them home
pre-eaten,
as memories of how each fruit
hit the tongue,
flooding your mouth with flavour.
Jam would seem a labour of Hercules
and leave the foxes unsweetened.


Crataegus monogyna

Hawthorn hedges
show the edges of ownership
in white lines of flourish
which cast a sickly sweetness
to each breeze.
The berries are an un-rorie red,
a modest shade,
and half-hidden by leaves.
Frost-softened, they form
a redwing’s feast.


Erica carnea

Bell heather banks
on a certain dryness.
Its grey-green leaves
are tight to the stems.
Its bells ring the changes
from palest pink to purple-red.
Whatever the colour,
bumble bees booze on them.


Sambucus nigra

Elder flowers
are champagne-sweet -
blanc-de-blanc -
unlike their rank-smelling stems.
The berries, picked black,
make a fine wine -
as gamey as Gamay -
and the more we pick
the less the birds overeat.
Let’s drink to slim thrushes.


Trollius europaeus

Beside a ditch,
surrounded by thousands
of its open cousins,
a solitary globeflower
displays its golden ball,
a closed churn
among the butter’s cups.


Anemone nemorosa

Among the first to fumble
in the waking of spring,
the wood anemones’
pink-flushed white stars
come out to twinkle
before the beech leaves
send them back to sleep.



Copyright © Colin Will 1996 and 2018

These poems were first published in Nomad magazine in 1996, but have not been published in any of my books.

Easter 2017

I believe this one is as close to an Easter poem as this old Buddhist can get. It was published in Sushi & Chips (Diehard, 20016). The place that inspired it was St Abb's Head. I was watching the guillemots on the rocks, and it occurred to me that the word for the red-legged guillemot is the same in Shetlandic and Icelandic - Tysties. They are special birds..

Tysties

(St Abbs Head)

Guano stains run down-rock

almost to the line

greened by sea-surge.

Shell-Grip, courtesy of barnacles,

roughens landing pads.

Neighbours sense snack-time,

whirr away, arrowing waves,

fly through their thicker element,

stab, engulf small fish

whose ends know no salvation.

A pointed egg rolls on rock

ledge, falls or is saved,

pouched and warmed. The choice

is the wind’s, or the gusting gull’s.

Meanwhile, taut in his tree,

the lanced man stiffens,

circlet of barbs, fly-crust,

selects himself, victim and victor.

She pictures him,

tries to work out

how it all fits, as if it should.

Between ‘can’ and ‘must’

is a Poisson distribution

with ‘may’ on the curve’s

culmination. No guarantees,

no certainties, no knowns

but the ocean’s vastness

and life’s shortening odds

against the blind beaks.