Of Gales, Crows And Zoot Suits (18 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1. St Nicholas Kirk, Spring
The ivy's creepin up the wall
Towards the clock. Old Father Time
Already turns the snowdrops brown
How short their flowering! How sublime
In purity those sun frost days
When Winter leaves & Spring steps in!
St Nicholas in sober greys
A sanctuary from city's din.
Beneath the graves the quiet dead
Make the transition like the flowers
Who seem to pray with bended head
Their seconds spilled by fleeing hours

2. Gale in a Northern City
The wind is rocking the bus, like a steel cradle
Ownerless plastic bags, graze in the trees
A raging tethered ribbon, causes commotion

Beech leaves rat-at-at-at on a postman's back
He is folded over, facing towards the gale
Like a bull, about to charge a grinning matador

A man in blue pyjamas stares into the empty
Street from his council window. He is three
Months late in his rent. He'll not go out today

A wheelie bin lies toppled on the road
Refuse spills from its mouth like a sick drunk

A trampoline lies where the gale has flung it
A child's toy, tossed aside for another plaything

Dark granite confronts the sheering wings of gulls
The wind sighs from a giant wound in the sky
Heavens' breathing runs off the accustomed scale
Animals cower beneath the roots of houses.

3.The Murderess
Sally was sturdy at school, with reddish hair,
With a meditative stare, and freckles
Nobody shuddered when she walked through a door

Her fingers were squat and nimble,
Her handwriting, precise and bare of scrolls
We shared the vista of roofs and sooty clouds
Walked between classes to the sound of the period bell;
Dreamt, like that Mr Right would canter boldly up
On his snow-white horse, from the happy-ever-after

Our alma mater became an ancient wood
Where beetles scuttle through memories.
We were all quite bewildered, in our quiet lives
Hearing that the dunce of the class in bravado
Had murdered her faithless husband

Everything has the potential to reach the edge
To come to the starless abyss, its grave conclusion
Did she know, in her virgin girlhood
She'd put her handsome prince in a bloody coffin?

Amo amas amat
Well well, the age old story. Vintage husband
Sniffs out younger model
Even the humble daisy can crack cement
Women deteriorate, but men mature
Events blow over us like mournful shadows

Lawyers made the heartfelt apology; Crime of passion
British justice held no truck with that

I think her skull, in which the brains grew bright
Filled with a howl of grief against betrayal
His life, her freedom, gone in a knife flash
In all respects, the woman was perfectly normal
In war time people are killed for lesser reasons


4.She could have come from anywhere
She could have come from, anywhere and nowhere
Vienna, Ireland, England ran in her veins,
In Prague she slept in a squat,
Sang gypsy in sleazy corners.

Men went mad for her straddlings, moanings, lickings
Oh, she could pack them in, a full house every night
Her jade-green eyes were deep as the cool Pacific
But dead behind, like a drowned ship ten years down

Looked like she bathed in a golden tub of ass milk
Skin like a peach, with a sex-life down and dirty
Spoke like she'd been born to rolling lawns
Playing at poor, gap year of roll-your-owns

Lived life at the edge, in Marrakech
Chose junky lovers, relished the crazy buzz
A dangerous woman, of the ancient line
Delilah, Sheba, Mata Hari, Eve

Even streetlamps agreed the girl had grace
A cougar who could eat men up and purr.


5. A Very Auspicious Birthday: for Sally Evans, poet & editor
We are gathered here together
To give thanks for the birth of this poet,
Sally Evans, in the month of the Ram

This self-same day, was born on the birthday plate
Alessandra Ambrosio, Brazilian model
The very rice pudding of pouters
Rembrandt, Chopin, Rita Hayworth,
Boris Yeltsin, Mike Tyson, Billy Graham

All hail, this Sally,
This gardener and beekeeper, hen-wife and poet
This Pegasus amongst editors,
Born in the year of the horse in the Chinese system
Feet unbound, galloping out in style
A high bred filly, with an independent streak
Hard working, intelligent, popular

In the Zodiac, she is a ram
Three Cheers for the Stanza winner of Grand Slam!
May her hens continue to lay their golden wonders
And all her poems hatch out in perfect flight

6.Cauldron Rocks
Running North from Machrihanish
Camper vans and loaded cars
Surfboards, wetsuits flippers snorkels
Crabs in creels an fish in jars

Barefoot tousled water dabblers
Bubble round the cauldron rocks
Barnacled crustaceans scribblers
Race from chasers without socks

7.Child Model
He holds a pose for a painter
Hoping he'll fill his bowl
Hurry up mister his eyes plead
Look. I've scratched my drawing on the wall
Any buyers for that?

8. I Think I'll be a Sailor
I think I'll be a sailor. A-pirating I‘ll go
I'll have a monkey up on deck, wine barrels down below

I think I'll be a tailor. I'll be a wealthy man
I'll dress the rich and famous from Paris to Milan

I think I'll be a soldier, with bullet bomb and gun
I'll be a famous general, with medals, twenty-one

I think I'll be a tinker, I'll travel all the while
I'll have a shiny motorhome and roam the world in style

Hope I won't be a beggar. Hope I won't be a thief
I think I'll go and grow some more on beans and bully beef

9. Quiet Moment
So thin the curtains that the light shines through
Wild flowers make a shabby table gay
A shadow falls across the whitewashed wall
A stifled cough. No work begets no pay
A clutch of weary fingers stitch a seam
The evening passes quicker with a book
Two sisters, locked in weary solitude
Both hungry, but with little left to cook.


10. Girl in a Punt
The punt, a wooden water lily, glides
Along the Thames, an idyll green and wet
As into Hadley Pool the vessel slides

And here the trailing willow briefly hides
The love-forsaken Lady Henriette
Fleeing from heartbreak, gossip, cruel jibes

She'd hoped to join the Season's summer brides
The peak of her ambition, poor coquette
Vain hope the very raucous crow derides

She has fast growing life between her sides
The seed that means she never can forget
How trust betrayed, launched her on troubled tides

And this is how a springtime love duet
Becomes a shame, a shudder, a regret

11. My Uncle's Ladies
Cranking my clock back to Eden,
I revisit a blink of life
Colossal, cherished

I shared my childhood with my uncle's ladies
Cows who walked from the byre
Swaying fabulous hips

Together we lay in clover chewing the cud
Learned to take life on in peaceful mouthfuls
Munching in sunny meadows under the cornflower skies

12.Crossing Princes Street, Edinburgh
Princes Street… The trundle of trams
Patter of toddlers… rickety strollers
Judder of buses…. the traffic jams
Down in the gardens cricket and bowlers

Lights flash off and lights flash on
Dodge that motor and you'll be lost
Bang it's the castle noon day gun
Here's the pavement. Phew! We've crossed
13.Eavesdropper
Bohemian life's corrupt and vital in Marseilles where the sailors go
Women sell themselves for a trifle. Trade sails in where the breezes blow
The scented bushes and jasmines flower. Shady pleasures are out on show
A bored Madame from her fusty bower, eavesdrops on a negotiation
Fashion's sexy but facts are power. Kaleidoscope of tribes and nations
Trawl the bars for a bit of skirt. Drink or the current drug sensation
False façade of a jaded flirt. Here is danger, delight and dirt

14.Zoot Suits
We come to Britain from Jamaica man
An Trinidad, West Indies labourers
It's cold and dingy. We ain't got no plan
We can't afford no fancy cars or furs

Lordy, we miss already swaying palms
The smell of Mama Babba fryin yams
Check out our zoot suits. See us flaunt our bling
And when yo' British rain falls down, we sing


15.Campden Town
Camden Hill Road, a Sunday night
Baptist Church on the corner of the street
Pub, church pavement's where the people meet
Sunset city in the warm half light
Children playing before tea & bed
A slice of the evening. A lemon curd bite
Sunday sermon tells that Jesus bled
To save us sinners from the fires of Hell
Old folks listen now they're almost dead
Granny in the wheelchair like a sucked out shell
Mouth pursed in and her jaw sunk down
60 years ago, a Cockney swell
Sunday, Sunday the week's pell mell
Slows to a sidle with the Baptist bell.

16.Hand-me-down Joe
Hand-me-down Joe rolls his trouser tops
Over his belt. As the hemline drops
From his second hand jacket and his stitched up shirt
His knees are scabby and his wellingtons hurt
He hasn't had a bath since the Lord knows when
An his folk doss down in a squatters' den
Hand me down Joe, no fixed abode
Dirt for a pillow and his bed's the road

17.Crows in the Frost
Leaves curl around their spines
Like famine-hungry people,
Hugging themselves for warmth

In the multi-storey woods
Crows glide into their landing bays

Up in the sharp-edged air
Planes drag strings of pearls
Over the plate-glass heavens

18. As the Clock ticks
Clouds like fraying damask, loosen and unravel.
Amongst the skeletal beech trees,
Scaffolding waits for its brick and concrete cladding

Under the boots of shoppers,
Trampled down in the lust
For desperate sales,
Early stars drown in city mud

I am still acquiring knickknacks
My family, soon, must toss
In the skip of my out lived time

Three cormorants fish from a rock beneath the prison.
In the tarry ripples of dusk
Rats whiplash their tails at the river's edge
Two swans dream of their cygnet days
Amongst the freezing tangle of the reeds

Tonight I fill with peace like a tired cat
As the clock ticks into the new year

I am not tomorrow yet
Aloneness is a comforting companion.

It does not mind that
I am a limping fox
A fiddle with no bow
A high wire walker, wobbling
A many-faced chameleon
In the human jungle

I listen to the sand
Hissing through the hourglass
I am not tomorrow yet