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

After Dunbar

I'm reprinting below a poem I wrote some years ago, published (and still available) in my 2010 collection: The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café (Red Squirrel Press).

I've always been very fond of Dunbar's poetry. To me he's the most accessible of the post-Chaucerian Scottish Makars. The range of subjects he covered is very wide, and I find him very readable. Some of his relatives held lands at Biel, near Dunbar, and it's been suggested that he took a surname from the place he came from - William of Dunbar.

The poem which follows came after reading one of Dunbar's most famous poems. It's important to say that this is not a 'translation' from Dunbar's Scots into modern English, nor is it a 'version' of the the original poem - it's very different, and goes off in different directions. It reflects on Dunbar's times - what you could and could not do in winter - but it also contains my own feelings and experiences, as an original poem should.

It's appropriate to the time of year, so here it is:

The Low Point
(after ‘A Meditatioun in Wyntir’, by William Dunbar, c 1460- c 1520)

“Dirk and drublie days” right enough,
but the heavens are not always sable –
some days there are true skies, and a wind
shifted from Siberia, to seek unfurnished skin.

Today the longer dark hours are filled
with entertainments then curtailed. It’s hard
to imagine what true darkness meant
for plays, poems, music – summer pursuits all.

Scratching by candle, each scrivener wrought
on quires of deckled paper, by goosequill and gallol,
words of wisdom, terms of love and learning,
some meters of beauty to catch future’s eye.

Warring motives lay on from every side.
Despair’s the easy one now, so much bad news
in these cold times, suggest the one
begets the other. Patience dismissed,

and fortune damned – predestiny leaves no room
for innocent actions. We may as well be doomed
as blessed, and with an equal chance. Causality
is on a winter break, along with warmth and light.

Slyly, with some pretence of favour, chilly whispers
question why I carry forward a life that soon
I’ll leave behind, with loves and friendships
broken links, unconnected leads and empty ears.

The forgetfulness of age is a brotherly service,
for remembrance of ourselves in youth
would give us pain – the way we were,
the things we did, the chances missed.

And death to come is final leveller;
low or high, we similarly stoop to enter
the same one-way system, a singularity,
the dimming doorway to a hall of nothing.

But yet, four minutes today, five tomorrow,
the nights imperceptibly shorten, and at some point
I’ll know times have changed, that summer pleasures
lie ahead, and will return. The ball rolls round.

Copyright © Colin Will, 2010

The burial of the Count of Orgaz

I wrote this haibun for a prompt from the Eyemouth Writers' Group. I don't think I'll publish it - it shares some elements with one in The Book of Ways - but here it is anyway.

The burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586

‘A very parfit gentil knight’, by all accounts, and a generous donor to the church, the death of the old Count caused much lamentation in Toledo. Fortunately, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, later to be known as El Greco, - the Greek – had settled in the city and had begun to paint there. He was commissioned to record the death of the Count, and he produced what is undoubtedly his masterpiece, then and still displayed in the church of Santo Tomé. The painting is in the shape of an arch. In the lower half we are in the realm of humanity. Portraits of the local nobles form a long line of mourners, rendered in recognisable detail. At the centre of the lower half is the body of the Count, and on either side of him Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine, descended from Heaven as a mark of special favour, to bury the Count. They are very colourfully dressed in religious vestments, a contrast to the more sombre phalanx of local dignitaries.

It is the upper half of the painting, however, which astonishes and mystifies me. Never having been a Christian, I am often confused by paintings of religious themes depicting specifically Christian iconic elements, which may be obvious or well-known to those having grown up in the faith, but about which I know nothing. The top half of the painting is a depiction of Heaven, with Christ in Majesty above all, surrounded by the winged angels and the remainder of the heavenly host. Mary is in a central position, holding open a funnel-shaped fold in the fundament. At the lower end of the funnel an unformed figure, looking like a swaddled baby, is being helped into the narrow passage by an angel. This, we were told, was how the soul was often depicted in medieval and Renaissance paintings. It looked, and was obviously meant to look, like an inverted birth canal, through which the Count’s soul would ascend into Heaven. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time, the imagery baffles me.

It’s some years since we visited Toledo, that wonderful city set high on red rocks above a bend in the Rio Tajo, but I’ve never forgotten it, and El Greco’s masterpiece springs to mind whenever I think of it. It was raining when we arrived, and the colours were El Greco’s colours – deep greens, blues and greys. By the time we left in the afternoon the sun had come out, and the city was bathed in light. From the cliffs overlooking the plain, we watched a pair of vultures circling, a new tick in my bird book, a reminder of mortality.

an art pilgrimage -

in a hot Spanish autumn

a cool oasis

Copyright © Colin Will 2014

08/12/2014

This blog

The poem I posted yesterday was written in 2010 following a visit to the battlefields and cemeteries of the Somme area in 2009. It was published in Snakeskin in 2010, and included in my 2012 collection The propriety of weeding (Red Squirrel Press, 2012).  I posted it here at the request of a friend on Twitter. I suppose there might have been a techie solution to the 140-character limit, but what I came up with was to post the link to the blog post in the tweet.

However, I'm wondering what to do next with this blog. I've finished more than 100 poems so far in 2014, and many of them have been posted in a private, closed Facebook group as drafts. In a sense that group has taken the place of this blog as a place for posting drafts for comments.

I'm thinking I might convert it to a blog for previously published, copyrighted poems I want to draw attention to. Or I could use it for events, readings and so on - things I don't usually post on my other blog (Sunny Dunny).

So I'll develop my ideas, and eventually make this a public blog again.

Poem for Remembrance Day 2014

Missing


David Will was the first name I read,
same name as my first son.
I breathed again after a long gasp.
Missing, and the date and place.
Regiment: Gordon Highlanders of course,
because that’s the one they all joined,
the ones from Buchan, the hinterland
behind the coastal towns, places
my forebears lived and laboured.

Remains not found or identified,
fragments of anonymous bone,
strips of nameless flesh,
meat for the trench rats, a red stain
in the puddles that quickly dribbled
into pools of mud, churned by incoming shells
or the boots of marching men.

John Will was next, and in the lists
another John, four Jameses,
a Duncan (my other son’s name),
two brothers, William and George.
Grandmother’s maiden name produced
a new batch, adding Mutch to Will,
folk from Strichen and the Newburgh..

Twenty-five names in all, men who travelled
from Huntly to Ypres, Ellon to Cambrai,
and did not come home. My grandfather made shoes
in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, never spoke
about his service, but he marched back
and fathered my father, the year after
hostilities ended, but didn’t.

Walled gardens feature frequently
in this landscape, each with their strange crops:
ranks of identical upright slabs
with simple inscriptions, books of lists.
Planting poppied crosses doesn’t work for me;
commemorating isn’t what I want to do.
I try to make personal connections, but I can’t.

That happened later in a farmer’s field.
A drainage ditch in the chalky soil
had opened an unmapped trench,
and in the bottom we found bullets,
a belt buckle, and a few white bones:
a shiny rib, and the smooth head of a femur.

Copyright © Colin Will 2010
Published in The propriety of weeding, Red Squirrel Press, 2012