The Hiroshima poem

It's now 70 years since the first atomic bomb - Little Boy - was dropped on Hiroshima. This poem was published in Daemon 7/8 in 2005. I read it at an event in Glasgow on Hiroshima Day that year. By coincidence, that was the day my friend Robin Cook died, and it was Tommy Sheridan who told me the news, at that very reading.


Peace and quiet

In the newsreels it’s always silent;
in-sucked dust heats to incandescence,
molten beads fountain, pillar up,
a dirty eruption. Shock waves
squeeze steam out of clear air
in annular clouds. Close-ups focus
on the boiling glow, the head,
a roiling rotisserie. Roasted birds
fall from the sky. On the ground
trees, petals, pets, people, puff
to vapour in a roar, a scream
we can’t hear. On screen
Enola Gay drones home.

In a warm autumn, shinkansen zips smoothly
through the countryside. Hinoki forests yield
trunks for torii. In little fields, clipped lines
of tea bushes suggest Versailles for taste buds,
stooks of rice straw smoulder in smudge fires,
and crows foregather in persimmon trees.
Train windows, triple-glazed, cut out outside sounds.
We’re in a steel speed capsule, streamlined,
hurtling serenely to Hiroshima.


 Copyright © Colin Will 2005

The biker poem

A long time ago, in a galaxy ... No, that's wrong. But a long time ago, when I lived in Midcalder and was working at the British Geological Survey, I got myself a moped, then a small motorbike, and then a medium-sized commuter bike - a Honda 175. So I was a biker, but not the leather-clad, tattoo-covered Hell's Angel type. I used it to get to work in the morning, and to get myself home in the evening. Most of the time I enjoyed it. I didn't like winter biking, especially in some of the cold, snowy winters we had in the 1980s. I recall driving it very slowly, with both boots sliding along the ice to keep myself upright. And I didn't like my crash, when I hit a stretch of unlit roadworks near East Calder, came off and broke my collar bone. But I loved biking on summer weekends, on country roads, the bendier the better. The road along Loch Lubnaig was my favourite, and I've written about that elsewhere.

I used to take our eldest son to school on the pillion, until I had a puncture one morning. I controlled it, having had earlier punctures, but when I told Jane about it she said, 'That's it! You're going to learn to drive a car; you're not putting my son's life in danger.' So I did, and somehow the bike didn't get used much after that. I gave it away in exchange for two bottles of wine - it wasn't worth anything more by then - and I haven't driven a motor bike since. I'm still licensed though, and some nice summer days I look back with nostalgia, and I dream about the very real pleasures of biking.

This poem was written in 1995, and published in my second collection, Seven Senses (Diehard, 2000).


The thing itself

After rain the road flashes
like a metal river.

Bends are rounded
by a shift of weight,
an eye for line, a lean;
routes unroll under pegged feet
straddling wheels.

Wind is helmet shake
and visor flutter;
head wobbles as speed twists up.
Poles flicker past
in a chuff of air;
engine notes blatter from walls
or are sucked silent in gaps.

No space for thought,
no time for calculation.
Wish into action
as action fast-forwards life.
Spray fizzles,
bees bullet the head,
smells assail, ripen, and are gone.
Between machine and rider
no decisions, destinations.



Copyright © Colin Will, 2000

The ambiguous poem

Sometimes I don't want to be crystal clear in a poem, even a short poem. Sometimes I want the reader to figure out the meaning without having it spelled out. Poems that make you work a bit tend to last longer in the memory, I believe.

This one, written as far back as 1993 and published in my first collection - Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996) - is an example. To have been explicit here would have been wrong. It's a very short poem, but probably needs reading two or three times. I've long forgotten where the particular setting was, but it was a beach with shallow water where you could walk out a considerable distance without getting out of your depth.

I haven't read it in public for years, but every time I did read it, someone would come up to me and ask, 'Did you mean ... ?' And yes, I did. The sea is a scary place, and maybe it's not always obvious why it is. Sometimes you do get out of your depth.


Tides

Walking far out in the clear green sea,
watching waves at eye height
just that little bit further,
I begin to fear, not being overcome,
but losing, for no reason,
the urge to resist letting go.



Copyright  © Colin Will 1996, 2015

The quantum physics poem

Although I worked in geological and botanical organisations, I've got a fairly broad grounding in the other sciences, and quantum physics has always fascinated me. 

Back in 1998 I walked the Fife Coastal Trail in five sections over some summer weekends, and I managed to write a poem in each section. Four of them were first published in the magazine Fife Lines, but this one wasn't taken. It did come out in Snakeskin, and in 2011 I put it in the Kindle edition of Seven Senses, where it's in the company of the other Fife walk poems. It's available from Amazon, where I've published several out-of-print titles. It pleased me to imagine Fife fishermen named Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and to place the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's cat paradox in their watery context. I also love the Scots word 'plouter'. It's what I do. It's what most of us do. 

I haven't quite managed to write a poem about collapsing wave functions, but some day I might.

The physics of fishing
(Fife Ness, 1998)

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


Copyright © Colin Will, 1998, 2011

The early morning poem

I'm an early riser, always have been. When I was working I lived at some distance from Edinburgh, so I had to drive from Mid Calder to King's Buildings or later The Botanics. After we moved to Dunbar I joined the ranks of rail commuters, shivering on the platform at Dunbar Station to wait for the 7.40 am train.

I didn't mind getting up at 6:15; the house was quiet, and I had my routine, a shower, coffee, making up my sandwiches for lunch, then leaving home, usually before the family woke up. From autumn to spring it meant I left and returned in darkness. And I found that I got up early even at weekends. Since retirement in 2002 I still get up early, maybe around 7am. It has its compensations though, seeing dawns, hearing birdsong and the sounds of towns waking up. Here's a poem from those working days - I wrote it in 1993, and it was published in my first collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996):

Opening gambit


Dawn's the finest time there is.
I can't fault it; clear or clouded,
it's somehow always novel,
watching skies open towards a sunrise
behind the hills, or pinkening
the city's castle- and spire-lines.
Heaven knows I've seen enough of them,
but there's always the hope
of life becoming brighter
in the hour of the world's lightening.

Copyright  © Colin Will 1996, 2015

The gym poem

I've mentioned before, probably several times, that I go to a gym regularly. The habit started probably some time in the 1980s, when I was working as Librarian at the British Geological Survey, then based on the University of Edinburgh's science campus. There was a gym there, we were entitled to use it, and I did, often in lieu of lunch.

When I moved to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1988 I missed it, but for a time I was allowed to use the University's facilities at The Pleasance. Then the rules changed, and I couldn't use it, so I sometimes went to a private gym, but most often I used the gym at the Commonwealth Pool. Then I got too busy, and didn't go regularly, until after we moved to Dunbar in 2000. There's a gym here, in the Leisure Pool building, and after I retired in 2002 I was eligible for reduced rates. For a very small monthly payment, I have unlimited off-peak access to the gym, the health suite and the pool. I try to go three times a week, and I'm convinced of the health benefits. But it's also a social thing. I have friends who go there regularly, and we find the time to chat between struggling with the treadmill, the cross-trainer, the resistance machines and the dumb-bells.

So it maybe won't come as a surprise that from time to time I'm challenged to write a poem about the gym, and once or twice, I have. This one was first published in the New Voices Press anthology, Working Words (2008), and is included in my 2012 collection, The propriety of weeding, available from Red Squirrel Press.

Working Mothers

Monday morning, kids crêched,
time to hit the gym
for a weekly workout.

Time to catch
the latest chat,
as you run for dear life

facing the mirror
of yesterday’s extra helping,
seeing tomorrow’s toned

and youthful body;
squeezing out the weekend’s toxins,
working up a sweat,

a schedule to tuck and tighten,
to firm and reform your figure,
recover your before-baby body.

Row, run, step, push,
the cycle of exercise freewheels
to the sounds of rap and chatter.

Meanwhile, in the corner,
a puffing Gran tries to reset
her own odometer

to ten years back,
hoping for twenty more,
betrayed by connective tissue

which snaps when it used
to stretch, by ballooning veins
and the hourglass streaming faster.



Copyright © Colin Will 2008, 2012

The geological poem

I'm calling it that, but in reality I've written quite a few poems which feature geology and the other earth sciences. I did Open University courses in Geology, Geochemistry and Geophysics back in the day, and I worked as Librarian in the British Geological Survey for fifteen years.

This one's also a local poem, set in the Bathgate Hills. I moved to Bathgate as a teenager in 1957 or 8. Much later Jane and I first set up home together in Bathgate, and our two sons were born there, so I know the Hills very well. Geologically, much of it's a volcanic atoll with a fringing coral reef, Carboniferous in age. There are a fair number of volcanic dykes, and a couple of them are associated with lead ore deposits. Near Knock Hill, the Silver mines were discovered in 1605 by a Linlithgow collier named Sandy Maund, and mined out by 1613. It's a high-temperature orefield, with silver, lead, zinc, barytes, nickel and arsenic minerals found in a feeder dyke - possibly an old 'black smoker' hydrothermal deposit. I explored the mine in my younger days, and researched the history too, finding shafts called God's Blessing and The White Hole. So that's where this poem comes from. It was published in my first collection - Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996).

Mining silver


“God's Blessing” ran out too soon.

Where the Silver Bourn flows below Cairnpapple’s kist,
Sandy Maund’s ‘wondrous ore’ shone like metal hair,
till Saxon miners clipped it all away
in seven short years.

At Windywa’s the minister’s flock diminished
and he migrated, his line returning as Lord Beaverbrook.
Inside Aitken’s mine the timbers can be squeezed like sponge;
a fat toad squats in an alcove, in the dark,
and round the entrance there are burning nettles.
On the spoil heaps dead hens advertised
nickel, arsenic, and cobalt too - the Devil’s metal -
for blessings are seldom wholly Divine.

The dark and stinking muds in tropical lagoons
at Pumpherston, Uphall, Winchburgh,
transformed to coked and calcined oil-shales; voids
to swallow schools (the price of cheap land),
and hideaway shooting galleries
for the Linhouse Water sniffers.

At Knock you’re on a wrecked reef,
a fossil black smoker, plundered for profit, like the rest.
From the atoll’s stump view
Ochil and Pentland scarps, below, between,
remember coal swamps as you breathe
Polkemmet’s brimstone.

West Lothian’s an extractor’s Paradise;
new holes are easily punched in the Central Belt,
and the folk are so well used to their waste lines that
the Westwood bing’s preserved, for Heaven’s sake.

By the ‘Blessing’ shaft yellow iris flags waggle
in the summer breeze, and there’s always
a lark nearby, with his silver flute.
The grasses ripple by like waves of hair,
or fronds in a coral sea.


Copyright © Colin Will 1996, 2015