The Post Mortem Reveals Poem by Sheena Blackhall

There is a glen inside me
A stag stands within my skull
A curlew echoes in my inner ear

Can you smell the wind of the Cairngorms on my breath?
Can you smell the peat of Muick rise from my skin?

The Indian ocean laps at the twigs of my veins
My nails scratch at the horror of Auschwitz
Like a crab moving over the surface of history

Crammed into the coracle of my brain
A tranquil Buddhist monk, a frenetic John Knox
Navigate the alpha waves of my consciousness

Poetry blinks like a lighthouse onto my retina
Prose is the sea gull galumphing on the shore

Gall stones are the legacy from schooling
Scars are where I broke its glass ceiling

In the nest of my heart
My dead child opens his beak andcheeps in vain

Am I happy?
Once I stepped into an August sunbeam
And vanished into cosmic unconsciousness

My tangle of bones and sinews
Lay like a basket of slithering eels
Abandoned in the dust of ancestral mould

I have grown old amongst my family ghosts,
Cuddling my mother tongue, my spoken identity