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

The holiday poem

Whenever I go somewhere different, like Abroad, I make notes, keep a journal, but I also try to write poems, maybe a first draft. Then I come home and polish them. Back in 1996 we decided to take a gite in the South of France for our annual holiday, which was usually in July. We picked the property from a Gites de France catalogue, and booked it without knowing the region. Getting there was interesting. We drove down to the Channel Tunnel, then on to the Autoroute and down to the Languedoc. We did it in a single journey, without stopping, which was a bit crazy, but we were younger then, and we took turns driving.

We arrived in a small town called Paraza, not too far from Beziers, and on the bank of the Canal du Midi. It was very hot, and we were exhausted. The property was tiny, and on three floors, without air-conditioning. The toilet and bathroom were down a flight of extremely steep stairs in the basement, bedroom and kitchen on the ground floor, and the lounge upstairs. Half of the roof had been cut away to form a terrasse, which was pleasant in the evenings, but unbearably hot during the day. But it had THAT view over the Canal, which was beautiful. We explored the region, visiting Carcassonne and the Cathar strongholds. I started to learn about the history of the area, and had the first glimmerings of an idea for a novel (of which more later). 

I loved the place. The poem was published in Seven Senses (Diehard, 2000).

Out in the Midi sun

This is the place where fruit truly ripens.
In the shop I buy that dawn’s crop
of what we thought were pale boulders in the field.
The melon’s hard rind’s concentrically cracked
around the stalk’s remnants.
Revealed, the luscious perfumed flesh,
holding the night’s coolness,
has the tang of toffee.

A thousand and more miles from the cool crags
and liquid hillslopes of my grey home
I shade my eyes from a hot heaven sun.

Haze lifts off the heated ground
and builds to clouds
whose tops boil and billow
then float off on a sea-sucked breeze,
pulling in more Med moisture
until two cloud-heads merge
in a kiss of wispy fists.

I’ve half a month of Midi memories;
of rusted ochre gorges;
the dust-green of spiny bushes;
limestone pinnacles, fortressed
against the Inquisition’s prying armies;
of beaches where breasts are pointedly
not noticed;
where colours are all colours
and all shadows are black;
where a roadkill snake,
out from its orchard,
paid the price
for crossing back to Eden.

Bee-eaters buzz the plane-trees
in iridescent bomb-bursts,
and drowning cicadas somersault,
trying to fly through water.
Vineyards work harder in the heat,
transforming light into sweetness,
water into soft wine to warm
the awesome black and starry nights to come.

Copyright © Colin Will 2000

The judging poem

Having just finished judging a competition, and subsequently blogging about my judgely process over at the Sunny Dunny blog, I thought I'd post this whimsical poem from The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café, published by Red Squirrel Press in 2010.

Judging nature poetry

Typescript poems festoon the branches.

I walk through the grove,

letting blackbird’s alarm

alert me to today’s winner.

The whale’s verse boomed and chirruped

on the constancy of krill and swimming;

why life is a fluke

and so hard to fathom.

To the beaver, all was willow,

and how sweet the bark of birch

in the deep clay dam of winter.

Doves sprang to the defence of wars,

for the multiple freedoms

loosed each successive armistice

from the pious hopes of peace.

A neighbour’s cat praised

the stupidity of sparrows,

the playfulness of fieldmice,

and other victims.

The prize was reserved

for the eloquent silence of vegetables,

in which the wisdom of artichokes

brought forth a flowering

of edible metaphors.

Copyright  © Colin Will, 2010

A personal poem

This one's a very personal poem, about the illness and death of my middle brother Graeme in 1991. I wrote it a few months after his death, and it was first published in Cencrastus in 1993, and collected in Seven Senses (2000). Graeme had been admitted to hospital on a New Year's Eve, with severe pain, which his GP thought might be renal colic. It turned out to be testicular cancer. I will never forget that New Year, and it's one of the reasons I don't celebrate Hogmanay. Initially the doctors didn't hold out much hope, but he pulled through the first treatments. Secondaries - metastases - popped up in various tissues, and mostly responded to treatment, but an inoperable tumour in the pancreas was the one which finally killed him. 

My parents had gone to visit my other brother in New York, but when I saw how bad Graeme was I called them, and they flew home. I met them at the airport and drove them through to Edinburgh. My mother stayed with Graeme, but my father wanted to get home to Comrie, to pick up his car so he could do any necessary driving for the family. So he and I left Edinburgh. When we got to Comrie his neighbour came out to tell us Graeme had died while we were on the road. That was undoubtedly one of the saddest days of my life.

Then, over the weeks that followed, I started to reflect on it, and I wrote the poem. I thought long and hard about whether or not I should publish it, because it is so personal, but I decided to send it to Cencrastus, and it was accepted immediately. So it's a memento, a memorial, a catharsis, a cry of pain, a reflection on mortality - all of these things.

On saying goodbye to a brother

Seven years ago I first thought

to say goodbye.

Your first illness,

your crippling pain,

frightened me.

I wanted it to end,

as they said it would,

in a few short weeks.

Seeing your pain

I imagined my own.

The treatments were terrible;

days dripping precious metals

and plant juices

into your cells;

always putting stuff into you

and taking pieces out.

I learned all the names -

Vinblastin, Cisplatin, Methotrexate -

and what they did.

(They turned down your flame.)

We were close in age

and yet apart in spirit.

You accepted much in silence

while I rebelled, nervously.

You let life lead you

and I tried to cut new paths.

We had moved away without farewells.

I was impatient with your

fecklessness, and other failings,

my own of course not so self-evident.

Before that New Year,

you'd hidden discomfort

but it wouldn't go away.

Later you couldn't,

and we all saw

the hollow fear behind the face.

Time elapsed,

as it does if unconsidered,

and treatment sessions

seemed to postpone concern.

Two years on I cried

when they said you were clear.

But little clumps of madness

lurked in your body's byways

and had to have their say.

You nearly died so many times

that when you did

I almost didn't know

how much I'd miss you.

Copyright © Colin Will, 1993, 2000

The archaeology poem

I'm saying this is the archaeology poem, but in fact I've written several poems on archaeology over the years. I'm interested in the subject. I suppose it's related to my major and abiding interest in palaeoanthropology, the study of human origins and development. And of course there's a connection to geology, which I studied formally, and in which field I worked for 15 years.

This poem, written in 2004 and published in my collection 'Mementoliths' (available on Kindle) had two inspirations. The first was seeing a local dig at Knowes Farm on an East Lothian Archaeology Week Open Day. The second was seeing a painting by my friend Carmen Ambrozevich. Unknown to me, she had also visited the dig that day, and her lovely painting was inspired by it, as it later inspired me to remember what I'd seen. I love these kinds of connections.

Knowes Dig
(for Carmen Ambrozevich)


Traprain, in a neutral lozenge,
sits on a field of brown velvet
soil wrapped round the sides

of the painting. A Roman ring –
smoky blue glass – and other
archaeological trinkets

share space with a buried cow.
Yellow bone bisects the ditch.
Long spine, top of the skull,

horn cores and silent sockets,
testify to tough husbandry
or bellowing sacrifice.

Hearths of flat stones circle
within circles of fallen walls,
Venn diagrams for settlements,

the symbolic logic of life
on an Iron Age farm.
Surveyors level the site,

providing datum lines
to link the Votadini
to the expressway

between Dunedin
and Dunbar, an alignment
skirting the old hill’s

quarry-socketed gaze. Down here,
the intersection between Bass,
Pencraig, the Law and Traprain,

the perfect site for bone ash beaker,
stone-slab cist, time capsule
without starting date or finish.


Copyright © Colin Will 2005