Circus: Poems In English Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Not my Circus, not my Monkey (Polish Proverb)

Not my Circus, not my Monkey
I live in a totally different country
Where even the Cheshire cat is chunky
And every dustman owns a flunky
Where mice are huge and giraffes are stumpy
Porridge is spicy and tramps are swanky


Jottings for a Noctuary
The darkness of the dead hours
Chills all night musings bitter to the bone

An owl floats, wings like rippling velvet,
Across the moon's stark face

In somebody's house, life
Gutters like a candle
Someone's Adam's apple
Rattles like a snake

A teddy is slumped, wall eyed
In a yesterday house I lived in long ago
It was never really my teddy,but I pretended

‘It's your brother's, ' mother told me
Though he was fourteen, smoked and went with girls

My shadow is hunched on the bed
Like a kicked bean bag
It never learned the knack of charming others

Softly, softly, like owl-breast feathers
The snow drifts down,
Into the waiting arms of the frozen world


Gerard Rochford,i.m. December 2019
He may have gone away,
His home be dark and cold,
His words will always stay.

His life was never grey
From Worcestershire's threshhold
By Hong Kong's rich array.

To Aberdeen'shighway
A Dead Good Poet, bold:
With much of worth to say.

His poems were global, stray
Against all war and ill
Such poems are here to stay
He has not gone away


Mare Solemnis: inspired by a totem carved by Martin Raynor
The North Sea totem is crowned by a cormorant
Shaggy wings outstretched
With a golden fish in its beak
Suddenly snatched by death

Beneath its claws, the head of Aeolus
God of the storm winds, cheeks
Puffed out like a clouds from a pressure cooker
Or an angry Highland piper

The mediaeval sun shines out
Over a nude girl, menstruating
Representing the ebb and low
OfNatural cycles

Two seamen dance attendance by her side
While in a boat below
Sailors row ferociously off to nowhere

Three magnificent ship's cats
Ratters, from whiskers to tails
Gaze out on the glassy horizon
Of the gallery floor
A suitable totem for a Sea Port City


Scottish Kali: inspired by The Age of Kali by Stephen Bird
Scottish Kali confronts the bemused observer
She is blue as Krishna's skin
Multi-faceted, many headed
Her profusion of legs, dangle
From Celtic kilts, like a spaghetti junction
Of Highland dancers' kilts

Ceramic Kali, Celtic destroyer
Crushes men like walnuts underfoot
She is making a clean sweep of the world
The Eastern Spirit of the Apocalypse


On Ageing
The years have fluttered off like moths
The moonlight casts a sickly glow
My sheets are cold as winding cloth

I'm like a scarecrow grey and wan
Watched many seasons come and go
I wake surprised to see the dawn

And all around us is so changed
Now I walk tentative and slow
The climate curdles, grows deranged

People are now attached to phones
It is the winter of the crow
Skies fill with predatory drones

Forests are felled, mile after mile
Once they were home to bird and doe
Mankind is driven to defile

The very air, once rarefied
Is rank, where noxious gases grow
Ice caps and habitats destroyed

Seas, choked with plastic turn malign
Destroying cyclones wheel and blow
While governments ignore each sign

Soon earth itself may be a ghost
Into oblivion, gone tiptoe
All native beauty squandered, lost

Across the world wars suppurate
Whole populations, aimless, go
The victims of the Gods of hate
I have grandchildren. Will their fate
Be compromised, a cruel cost?
Will intervention come too late?

Soon, I'll be dust, part of the dew
Of this small planet, tempest tossed
Earth, what have we done to you?


The Mouse in the Corner
I am the mouse in the corner
Clicking and clacking, skeleton's teeth
My worries scuttle under rocks
Trying to stay out of sight
My masks change frequently
Mechanical as clocks

Time ticks by.
I don't do family quarrels
I'd rather stand alone and watch the rain
I grow afraid of steep stairs, slippery ice,
But I remain as punctual as a train

After happenings I need a day to recover
For the sediment to settle
I dislike fuss and bother

Life gives no chance to edit out mistakes
Grief has no grave, it dogs me constantly
Daily tasks are my little pegs of normality

So late, so late
I learn what I should have held dear
I am the mouse in the corner
Knowing the cat draws near



Dreams
Written by the Tea Tree in Glasgow's Botanic Gardens

I dream of a nub of ginger
I dream of a pinch of spice
I dream of a tea plantation
Where the pickers dine on rice

I dream of the great god Ganesh
On his shrines in Sri Lankan hills
I dream of the fruit bats flying
Where a slope with darkness fills

I dream of my kinsman crossing
The coolie lines to wed
Who left their wives on retirement
Sailed home to a single bed


Standing in the Queue
In 8 minutes the school bell will ring
In front of me, a dithering puffball
Of a woman procrastinates
3 times she lifts a bag of peppermints
3 times she puts them down again

To buy or not to buy
Does the shop stock Maltesers?
Down in the stockroom?
She's happy to wait, they're nice
After all, they've rung up half her purchases

I flex my fingers into a kneaded fist
I grit my teeth
I will her boiled in lava
I would like to smother her with her woolly hat
In 3 minutes the school bell will ring
Now it's lottery tickets she's after
Not one, but ten. The lottery machine
Jams, stutters, spits out what it should swallow
My blood pressure's off the scale

In 20 seconds the school bell will ring
I leave when she takes out a sack of her Xmas mail
I haven't bought anything


A Chronicler of Our Age
Inspired by Aberdeen at Leisure, a photographic exhibition by Martin Parr at the re-opening in 2019 of Aberdeen's Art Gallery

The Hummer Daddy Limo
Catch the mood of a hen party
A tipsy granny, bleach haired and spray tanned
Clutches an inflatable male nude
Penis erect as a cucumber

An onion as large as a beach ball
Is reflected in its prize winning cup
At the Duthie Park
In Exodus nightclub, a couple
Dance like dervishes in the mosh pit
Their hair spins like seaweed in a whirlpool

In Craigiebuckler kirk
39 OAP ladies strip the willow
With 11 OAP men,
Death having thinned their ranks

At the Castlegate,
Members of the City of God
Shake wigs, dreadlocks and bums
Drunk on the power of love

23 female ramblers stand smiling in puddles
Beside 2 men of the species
The others having ambled off to
The great hill walk in the Sky

By Burns Statue on Union Terrace
Hairy legged runners flex their aching muscles
Cheeks lobster-red with sweat

At Pittodrie Stadium
Supporters are snapped mid-cheer
Exposing pendulous tonsils
And irrefutable evidence of dental decay

In the Ashvale Chipper lures folk in with its smell
A whale of a haddock lies lathered in battered
Lolling beside a bed of chips and pies

R V Jones
The genius who was R V Jones
Had science intelligence deep in his bones
ToWestminster Abbey his corpse hasn't gone
He's buried in Corgarff in Strathdon


Presences
Owl leaves her boudoir on silky wings
Hocus pocus, she's gone in a blink
Slashes she leaves in air flow seamless together

The child leaves her warmth in the bed
A crease in a sheet, after she scampers off

Two hairs on the sofa reveal
The family cat's been round