Of Nero, Naples, & Dead Mens' Whispers: (18 Poems) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1. Dead Girl Weeping

Sir William Hamilton, the hook-nosed diplomat
Lord Nelson cuckolded, loved one thing more
Than Emma Hart, his rabbit-randy wife

In that ménage a trois, Vesuvius stood before
A thousand Emmas, filling his house
With torsos, vases, carvings, bronzes, busts
Ivories, statues, plundered from Pompeii

Prized from their ashen pyres' volcanic crusts
King Ferdinand of Naples marched against
That smouldering face, upholding the remains
Of San Gennaro (who'd survived the fire
Of Roman torture, and once stilled the flames
Fanned by an Emperor) . This made the lava stop
And read-hot furnace ashes cease to drop.
Goethe climbed this Vulcan's lair three times
Wedges between Heaven and Hell,
God and the Fiend
Queen Marie Antoinette, to Fontainebleau
Brought motifs from the walls of dead girls gleaned

Primo Levi cast a Pompeii girl
To represent lost children of the war
Hiroshima, the Holocaust, sad ghosts
Robbed of their future by Mars' brutal star.

It is a frame of reference spanning all
The centuries. When the twin towers fell
The New York Times described that horrid void
As in Pompeii, when Eden changed to Hell


2. Petrified City

The Bay of Naples. Summer. Hot flowers flag
A mountain kid tugs at its mother's teat.
The vines, so full and ripe their branches sag.
A plume of smoke grows from a summit crag
Ground trembles, anxious ewes begin to bleat
Losing the race through thistle-stem and jag.
Looters were smothered with their bags of swag
Gold in their hands, black lava at their feet
Caught in the red Volcano's tig and tag
The wealthy woman gagging for a shag
Found more than gladiators turn up heat
Dead in their barracks like some smouldering slag
The frozen tongues of wives who used to nag
Lost the last argument in terror's streets
As actors stalled the amphitheatre's brag
A merchant with his keys and money bag
Lies with his daughter. Now, no lover sweet
Comes wooing. Cupid's wearing Pluto's gag.
Fate spun its web this town to trip and snag
In orchard, brothel, see each person meet
Death, dressed in ashes like some horrid hag
Now, aeons on, fresh blossoms bob and wag.



3. The Keeper

I am the keeper of the cage, omnipotent.
Bobbing and scrambling my two rats scale the mesh
I pluck one out like a peach. She trembles, soft, in my hand,

Her quick ears quiver like barley touched by a breeze
Her claws clench, chilly and tight. I stroke her
Free of fright, blocking each botched attempt at liberation.

Life drips through her water bottle, is rationed in the
Scoops of food I profer. Her sibling spies a chink of opportunity,
Leaps into nowhere like a puff of smoke.

Two days and nights I set bait round the room.
Her pink, invisible eyes, out-watch, out-stalk me.
Somewhere she gnaws and fattens on stolen gains
Cunning and sly, ballooning on her booty
She is become a threat, a predator.

The ancient horror of plague-rid vermin rises,
Pads from the dungeon of collective memory.
Till, with a thwack, the trap door has her fast.
Back in her cage, her pink eyes glow like opals
Expressionless, defying divination.


4. Sectioned

The orange lies in segments, like a fear
of the mind's slippage.
Trepidation waits in mirrors, under the plate.
I hear the sighs of demons who berate
me from the crevices of walls.
My insane drowning ghost forms twins whose fate
is peeled and pipped. Their squeak's a lost refrain.

Henbane's the juice that's pumping in each vein.
My sense of self is eggshell thin, is frail
As ancient parchment under wheels.

What sieve contains a name in falling sand?
All hail the gods of misrule, who foretold a life awry,
As difficult as Braille
When pictures talk, when prating shadows scold,
My ragged mental bandages unfold
Leaving a whistling void, an Arctic cold.


5. What Kind of Person was your Latin Teacher?

The plumbing of her confidence was leaky,
Her eyes were frightened spiders
Running for safety into caves and wells
Down woods and altars in her lesson books.

Poeta est in Silva. Bold girls scared her.
More of a spoon than a knife,
Her life was a parking meter
Paid by the hour, more often faulty than not.

The day she cried, we laughed.
Stop it! she pleaded. Stop it girls! Behave!

Have you ever watched a fly with one wing walking,
Limping onwards, in hopes of a boot's reprieve?
This is my only nod in her direction
A title glued to a public bench of a poem.


6. Dead Men Talking

Tonight, the dead come trooping in, to talk
The handsome bully, the sot, the village don
The lecher-wolf, the dove, the shrew, the hawk
Into the primal melting pot, all gone.

Sharp-suited Nigel, wheeler-dealer ace
Style-icon Jackie, power-seeking John
Won each election, lost the final race
Into the primal melting pot, all gone.

Chewing a slice of turnip, quiet Rob
One of the submerged tribe the land leans on
Walked from a farm where wind's a keening sob
Into the primal melting pot, all gone.

Andrew, who only dispossessed the whin,
His village bones reduced to carrion
His field, a street where change blows coldly in
Into the primal melting pot, all gone.
It's late, too late to mourn, or miss the lost
The sun's true light turns counterfeit neon
How swift the pristine snows embrace the mud!
Into the primal melting pot, all gone.


7.I am Scotland, too

I am the colour of nutmeg,
Ripening in the rainy streets of
Crieff, Anstruther, Banff

Tomorrow I'll work beside you
Take your fare or your pulse
My eyes are slices of ebony

I stand beside you, patient, in the queue
I wait my turn.
I am Scotland too


8.Scotch Mist

The bus goes whoosh through puddles of a dirty-washing shade
The pigeons shuffle closer like guardsmen on parade
Wet cars, by lorries halted, like cockroaches, waylaid

It's the umbrella season, beneath a Noah-sun
When children, wearing wellies pretend they're having fun
Wet dogs shake drips, like floor-mops tied up at cafe doors
And trails of muddy footprints go squelching over floors

Events a year in planning, are cancelled, all rained off
The flu bug that you conquered, becomes hay-fever cough
And squads of tics and midges bivouacking in the grass
Surge out to prang the tourists and locals as they pass

It's odd...but when we travel to Portugal or Spain T
he thing all Scots folk yearn for, is misty moisty rain!


9.Childhood

I looked in my grandmother's memory and found:
An ice cream scoop that trembled on my lip
Nasturtiums where earwigs came to sip
A wave that broke in cups on a beach trip

I looked in my father's memory and found:
A toddler's feet splish -splashing in a pool
Lessons of hawk and hound in Nature's school
A trout that leapt and changed into a jewel

I looked in my mother's memory and found:
Red sandals that must not be scuffed or scratched
A feeble joy that must be earned not snatched
An autumn park where winter shadows hatched

I looked in the sun's memory and found:
A lea of grass that rustled like a sea
A galleon in the top branch of a tree
Freedom to run beyond the bounds of me


10. Terminal Five

Hurrah for the farce that is Terminal Five,
It swallows up cases and eats them alive
The Bermuda triangle of tourists and planes,
With a chic design ceiling that leaks when it rains.

Its staff is untrained and its system's chaotic
You sign up for Kent, but go somewhere exotic
Your photo is taken to keep things secure,
But the sick man of Europe, Heathrow, has no cure
For planes which can't run when the baggage is lost,
And like flotsam, the wreckage of travellers are tossed
Into buses for hotels that burst at the seams,
With no food or cold food and reams upon reams
Of forms to fill up, in the cattle-drive rammy

That's Terminal Five. Take a bed pan for granny
When loos cease to flush, and it's too much to bear...
There's a multi-faith centre that's open for prayer!


11. Ciao Roma

Ciao Roma! The traffic here sits in a coma
The rain would suit Jonah, but doesn't please me
With more than its quota, Rome's stuck on the rota
For deluges, downpours, and dank misery.

The Tiber is swollen, the bus is awash
With open-top puddles, umbrellas and slush
Of black sodden tickets, timetables and stubs
Like a scoopful of swilling from washer wives' tubs

It's wet at Atlantis. There's fountains for miles
Teeming down the piazzas, the plazas, the tiles
There are lochs on the balconies, pools on the plates
And the laps of the statues have turned into lakes.

Oh where are the vineyards, the olives, and the sun?
The sky's peely-wally. The posters have run
And even the sparrows are wearing galoshes
Like Scotland...a country of splashes and sploshes!


12.Naples

A girl is trying to eat her boyfriend's face
She is gnawing his nose and ears
Like a dog, nuzzling a bone.

Vesuvius lies with its torn belly
Swallowing the clouds

From tower blocks, public washing
Lolls like tongues

Billboards picket the harbour
A giant trainer stamps its mark on the eye
A woman with pearly teeth
Dangles a sanitary towel at passing lorries

A stop sign leans like a licked lollipop
Over a dwarf palm tree, squeezed into a pot.

A gypsy with a scab faced baby
Begs from car to car,
Grabbing alms in her purse of filthy nails

Here, they narrate in gesture
Flourish their arms in dilettante movements
Pluck invisible strawberries from the air
Bring an unseen orchestra to crescendo
Painting frescoes of airy explanation
One ear up, one ear down, like a half mast flag
A feral dog sleeps in the shadow of the valley
Of Death, that's Naples.


13.The Little Bride (Crepereia Tryphaena)

Not one word escaped her lips
The little bride, when they lifted her
Her skull turned to her left shoulder
Facing the ivory doll at her shoulder-blade,
Companion down the silence of the years.

On either side of the girl's head, golden earrings
Studded with pearls, had dropped from the withered ears.
Mixed with her vertebrae, a pristine necklace,
Pendants of jasper, green as the eyes of Pan.
An amethyst Greek-style brooch
gleamed through the rib cage
Showing the fight of a griffin and a deer.
By the bones of her left hand
Her engagement-ring, engraved in blood-red jasper,
Two hands clasped together.
Another has Philetus cut in the stone

Close by her hip, her box of toiletries,
Two combs, a small steel mirror
Cosmetics, an amber hairpin, a cloth of leather,
Fragments of a sponge.
The little bride was wrapped in fine white linen,
A wreath of myrtle fastened to her brow.
Her wedding and her funeral hard together.
Worms and not desire consumed her heart
The doll, a bridal offering to Diana
Unlike its mistress, kept its smiling face.


14.Mr Tomato's Sphere

Puritans shunned the tomato,
Thought it an aphrodisiac
Pomme d'amour, the lovers' appellation
A member of the Solanales Order
The Deadly Nightshade family of toxic killers
Pomme de Maure the apple of the Moors

At noon one day an American, Robert Johnson
Ate a basket of these red devils before an astonished crowd
In front of a whitewashed courthouse down in Salem
Disproving forever tomatos' evil intent.

The tomato is also the slang for a loose Woman,
The colour of the French Revolution
The colour of guillotine juice

Mr Tomato's Sphere should rotate on its axis
But sadly, a human construction, has ceased to twirl
Like a cheer leader's pom-pom.

The guide, a mini-Atlas, shoves it manually round
Its bronze face bares its broken teeth in a sneer.


15.Monte Cassino

Half way to heaven, the abbey of Monte Cassino sits on air
You cannot see the mountain, but it's there
War graves surround the slopes like sticks of chalk
You cannot see the bodies, but they're there


16.La Dolce Vita

On the street of the Via D'Azeglia
Seated beside a bin-bag oozing spaghetti
Two Romans sunbathe in the sun
They turn their bared arms round
Plunge a needle into rising veins.
It is Sunday and church bells are ringing.

Three girls walk round them, sunglasses
Raised like visors on their heads
Shining like a beetle's carapace
It is Sunday and church bells are ringing.


17. The Winds:

There's the northerly, summer, pleasant wind
That sweeps the blue Aegean
There's the Hurricane that whips up rain across the Caribbean
There's the violent squall that conquers all
In the midst of the Mediterranean
There's the cyclone storm where the Typhoon's born
In the sultry Indian Ocean

There's the sandy, dusty, dry trade wind that scours the hot Sahara
And the wet monsoon on the Malabar coast that's called the Elephanta There's the lusty, gusty, North East wind that winters in Alaska
There's the Bull's Eye Squall that rocks the yawl alongside Africa

There's the Rockies' friend, the warm wind,
That's known as the Snow-Eater.
There's the gentle breeze in the Hebrides.
There's the gale that's the feared Nor'easter.
There's St Francis' Lash, where hurricane's crash on the coast of Mexico There's the canyons of Nevada's scourge, the terrible, hot Diablo
There's the dry Haboob of a dust storm wind that whirls around Morocco There's the warm soft southerly sort of a wind,
The Spanish-Moors' Sirocco
There's the quick white squall, in a whirlwind form
That rises in the tropics.
There's the cloudy wind, the muggy wind that shrouds the Adriatic

There's the doldrums-calm where the trade winds meet
At the girth of the equator
There's the cloudy, foggy, rainy wind that lashes around Gibraltar
There's the westerlies and the easterlies that meet at the polar heights
There's a strong and a violent Nordic wind
That roars in the fjords at nights.
There's a night-time squall with thunder and rain,
Which sweeps the Malacca Straits
There's the warm Sundowner downslope wind at California's gates
But best is Zephyrus, sweet west wind, and Notus, the wind of fog,
The friend of sorrow, he's clad in grey, the bearer of mist and smog.


18. Nero's Bath

I am the Emperor. Alpha and Omega, born to be adored.
Have you seen my Golden Colossus, my Pleasure Palace?
I am the great Dictator, the Poet, the Actor-singer,
I am the mob's Adonis, the Lyre-player, the Charioteer.
I am history in the making.

Lives lie in the palm of My hand like so much seed
To spill or plant as I wish.

I am Rome. I order a bog to disappear and it happens.
Death works for me, I have sent him to silence many
Wives, mother, senators, lovers.

Have you seen my bath?
My mighty porphyry bath holds fifty bathers.
Three hundred goats are milked to fill its basin,
Their milk is the colour of the Imperial semen,
Which I'll bestow on all who share my ablutions

I itch, Judea winces. I shake a family tree
And plums fall to my hand
Christians call me the Anti-Christ
Cannibals all, they eat the flesh of their master

Wrapped in flames, they're the highlights of my Palace
Truly, you are now the light of world, I tell them