16 English Poems From The Poetry Lesson Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.My Cat
My cat has a whiplash tail
a sandpaper tongue
Despoiler of bird sanctuaries
his bloodlust never lessens till it's sated
though even streetlamps sway in a Winter gale

With eye popping speed he pounces
though the road is padlocked with ice

He walks the line between killer and purr
with paws both pussy soft and gangster-razored

He is light-footed, dispensing with condiments
Shaking a rabbit like a baby's rattle

2.The Page
the page is listening-
open your heart to it
paper will not judge
will not begrudge you
a moment of its time

the page is listening-
empty your mind in it
no need to clock in, clock out

it is always ready
to turn a new leaf

lift your pen
and touch it

it'll open its ear like a flower


3.Meditation on a Year Gone by
The year's rolled by like a cloud of pristine white,
Carrying parcels of days, weeks, months, all mounting
Up in a pile of sun, and rain and night.

They're not coming back, not ever, try as you might
You can't stop a single minute from disappearing
Your hopes and fears and imaginings, out of sight

Just sit in each moment, the grey, the dark, the light
Set thinking aside, and concentrate on breathing,
Sit quiet, in peace, put worry and care to flight

The raindrop weathers the stone, though small and slight
And Time, the file, your limit of days is grating
Think, if you must of a butterfly, slim and bright

Flowers and scents are the sum of its whole delight
Oh copy its ways, you there, when your mind goes racing;
Brooding on harms and imagined acts of spite

The moon in the sky sees mushroom and harvest mite
Rise and fall in their season, seed to ending
Though aeons may pass like dust, the stars sit tight
Let each day follow the wind like a child's kite


4.Please Can I have a Pet
Please can I have pet with a pelt like water?
Please can I have a pet with a luscious nose
Please can I have a pet who needs no walkies
Please don't give me a dog…not one of those

Please can I have a pet who steps out sassy
Like the Queen of Sheba visiting New York
Please can I have a pet with eyes like spitfires?
Please don't give me a pig….I don't like pork

Please can I have a pet like a high wire leaper?
A pet that blows by, light as a summer's blouse
A pet as supple as olive oil in a pitcher
Please don't give me a gerbil, or a mouse!

Please can I have a pet with claws like razors
A pet when stroked, that sings like a crystal bowl
Please can I have a pet to share dark hours with
Please…can I have a cat with a midnight soul?


5.Like a Landed Trout
Wings hitched up on either side
A gull flaps moodily over the ice
Like a cowboy gunman
Ready to squawk a challenge

A duck shakes its tail
The feathered Primavera of the pond

Robin clicks into the frame
Like a high-speed snapshot

A most immaculate blackbird
Checks me out for swag

High in the trees a throaty pigeon mumbles
She must be sucking marbles for elocution

Behind a fence a raven rasps a greeting
Raw as Edith Piaf on 60 a day

And here's a ridiculous Spaniel
A gangster's moll of a beast
Wearing a crimson basque to keep her warm

All under a single cloud like a landed trout
Grey cream and stippled pink on mother of pearl


The Spuriousness of Speech
After a chatter of greetings
Silence sweeps up words
Into piles of withered letters

Puffed up words that sprawl
Like Myxomatosis, Bacchanalian
Trepidation, obtuseness

Fleshly words, like shape-shifter
Twin-barrelled, head banger
Spare words like ache and stone and love

Language can be muscular or flaccid
Obese or anorexic, pale or florid

Now that my skin has wrinkled like a walnut
And suburbs breed like rabbits
More and more I live in the time of small bones
Stretched over my childhood summers
No words then gave voice to
Bird song, fish splash, sun


7.Lobster- Man
My friend Dermott was deep's the Atlantic
Snappy's a lobster in a pot
He'd spin thoughts like a netting shuttle
A perfect broth of a seaman Scot

Dermott bobbed through life like a walrus
Until love, like a gale toothed white
Roared him off like an outboard motor
Into the darkest storms of night

Hopeless then like a shipwrecked whaler
Dermott's sweetness soured to spit
Took rejection hard as a halibut
Dug a grave and jumped into it


8.Bridge, Glen Gairn
I loved the afterglow of reflected light on the water
Like a willow's blessing
On the passage of tiny trout over sun-warmed ripples

I loved its drips and how it made sound echo
Innocent bridge unnoticed by birds above
Its water carried childhood hours elsewhere

I loved the burn's flashes, its glittering boats
Of sun, its stainless motion
How leaves fluttered beside, like butterflies' wings

My bike droooped in the grass, up by the road
Everything then was huge to a child's eye
A snail could fill my hand
Daisies were most precious charms and bracelets
Laced round my ankles, wrists,
Upon my crown


9.Missed
From time to time your memory hoists its fin
and when the fin begins to break the deeps
from yesterday it's like a salmon's leap
and when the sun shines down, it's beaten gold
and through the gold are scales, all dropping tears
like snowdrops' heads and when my heart cracks wide
and yearns a pack of wolves begin to howl
and this is when I know you'll not be back
Never to see your face, not now, not ever
Death bears the dearest off, accursèd river.


10.Kubla Khan
I've heard it said that Kubla Khan
Was twice as big as any man
And when he went to have a poo
It was so large it blocked the loo

11.The Inuit
An Inuit with halitosis
Could never greet by rubbing noses
He strapped a sausage to his snout
And now his problem's sorted out


12.The Welsh Frog
A Welsh frog with delusions of power
Leaped higher than the Eiffel Tower
But when he came down
He fell splat on his crown
And his named it was Owen Glendower


13.The Cuckoo
A short sighted cuckoo called Gaynor
Laid her egg in a fat person's trainer
When he started to race
He got egg on his face
And the young cuckoo's fate? A no-brainer!


14. Frost in a Far City
A cadaverous moon
Hangs over an icy world

A fisherman with a watermelon small
Pulls on a full net

In far-off Beijing city
Skyscrapers glisten like marble dominoes

Frost in rutted pavements
In the rickshaw district
Gleams like a sequinned spitoon


15. Woman Sewing
Watch a woman sewing
Her wrist soars like a little bird
Tethered to the cloth

When the stars light in the sky
and the weary cattle lumber up to the byre
she sits like a purring cat
Licked by the fireflame

Only the cry of the baby in its swaddling
Occasionally breaks the peace

Watch a woman sewing
Bent like the virgin in a Pieta
Her face glowing and serious
The needle in her fingers a Cupid's dart


16. The Piano Teacher
I always came late for my lesson,
Seldom practised my scales and staccato arpeggios

Whilst she scolded and stormed
I would stare at the trees through the window,
They were out in the free air, keeping time with the lissom wind

Her tyrannical metronome, a little martinet
Functioned best in that dingy room of books and papers
Shoddy genteel, all reeked of age and rage

On rainbowed summer evenings filled with birdsong,
My reluctant fingers crawled through stunned gavottes

Her lips were thin as piper wire
Matching the wrinkles on her parchment brow

My father's music rose from his throat in notes
Clear as the thrush in the woods of nests and leaves
Nobody cracked his knuckles or froze his pulse

My piano teacher- spinster, tight as a wintry bud,
Was a stickler for form, for late Victorian manners
Which was why I was so astonished
To see her spit in the street
Just missing the polished boots of a man of substance