Skeleton Architecture

Yay! Sun! I always have the notion when the sun appears that perhaps it's time to put the gloves and hats away, but Scotland has had me in training and so they are all still out... They'll go away for a bit come June. May Sun in Scotland Then came the sun and, desperate for light we threw our bodies in its path, heedless of the wind; relentless giver of goosebumps on our bare flesh. We went outside and talked with our neighbours, swapping the pent up stories for what seemed to be the first time in months. Stories come out in the sun. All that was held in through the long dreary months: of grey, khaki, and brown; of the world rubbed out by gathering cloud; of the tears that fall in rain. But the wind still chilled and killed the new blooms and it would not fucking stop. And then this: It did. We had sun and warmth and bare skin and barbecues for at least two days. Three perhaps, if you  count the day the rain came back. But it did come back...

I'm throwing order to the winds to get this one in for Halloween, #22 will follow shortly. This is my first experiment in Scots poetry, which I shouldn't really be writing because I can't speak it, but there are some truly awesome words, some of which really need to get wider use! Particularly 'oorie' - that's just glorious. Some of the words are defined below the tankain detail, but really the word oorie is a poem in itself. Basic translation: It seems always cold/and the low lying mist is miserable and eerie/feet are always totally caked in mud/when the ghosties come through./They have tales that need to be told. Specially glorious words: clartit - related to clarty - muddy, clartit means totally caked in mud dayfelly - a low lying mist in a hollow or depression oorie - dismal, gloomy, miserable looking, hanging from the cold, cold and cheerless, depressive, lonely and sad, feeling of the supernatural, eerie, uneasy. I reckon we need to get ...

Oh there has been so much happening in 2016 that I'm not a fan of. Death's guest list has got way out of hand, and then Brexit and now Trump, not to mention the terrible situations that lots of people around the world have found themselves in. Things are changing, and not in the way I had hoped for, but that said, we have made remarkable progress in the last century. I'm hoping that we're like the frog jumping out of the well. For every three feet higher she jumps, she slides back down two feet. It's dispiriting, nobody wants to slide in that nasty goo, but it is still progress. Not long ago I went to a writing workshop in Glasgow where we were asked to write a long list of five things we loved, five things we hated, five things we believed etc. All these things, we were told, could be written about. So today I'm writing about one of the things I hate. The thing I wrote was:  "I hate Tories." But that's not fair. It's not just Tories. ...

It's been ages. Hot and sunny and dry. We've been hanging out washing, eating outside, and having water fights. It's been chuffing marvellous. So I thought it deserved a poem. I've been working on lots of poems lately - this is my fourth today! The other ones probably get more editing before I'll let them see the light of day, and then they're off on a special mission. I seem to have lost my usual way of wanting to stick within particular meter and rhyme structures, but that's OK. Perhaps it's the heat.  I can share this one, and I'm sharing it on The Prompt too (the prompt was 'window,' and this poem has open windows in it): The Hot. The Hot The hot has come with iris flowers, lawns beset with buttercups, bare legs and freckles, ice lollies dripping, and drifts of kids. Behind open windows we cannot sleep. Legs outstretched like the cat who shelters in the cool, leaving nests of moulting fur. Wea...

So I'm a bit late to this party, but Jackie Kay was named as the new Makar (the Scottish Poet Laureate) back in March, there's a lovely interview with her on Woman's Hour, talking about getting the phone call from Nicola Sturgeon (the Scottish First Minister). It's early on in the programme here . So I thought I'd share five of my favourites of her poems. First up is 'Her', a haunting poem which brings up more questions than it answers, and has a lovely rhythm to it. You can hear Jackie read it here . On the same site you can hear her read Things Fall Apart , which is a fascinating slice of an important moment in Jackie's life. I was drawn to it for the title, reminding me of Chinua Achebe's novel of the same name, taken from the line in Yeats' poem, The Second Coming : "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;". I love the way Kay focuses in on her father and then out to the context, finally lighting on the connection between th...

The prompt this week from Mum Turned Mom  is 'choice', and I'm choosing to take part with a poem about the difficulty in choosing, and Scottish politics. Politics! Sex and religion will follow (and have gone before). The Scottish election is coming up on Thursday, and I'm looking forward to voting. I know what I'm planning on putting on my polling forms, but I'll try not to put any subliminal advertising into this post (I won't change the colour of the background to influence you either). I know that my vote is a drop in the ocean, and I'm happy that that's the case in Scotland. I really like the Scottish Parliament, I think it works brilliantly, if you're wondering about the difference between that and the Westminster Parliament, just compare the Westminster PMQs with the Scottish FMQs (you'll find them on YouTube). Anyway, enough wittering, on with the poem. I was trying for a sonnet, but I ended up with a different rhyme scheme. It...

I think I don't like poetry. In fact I'm pretty sure. What I like is a brick of a book with well rounded characters, who can take me on a journey with them. I find that for me poetry can be navel gazing, twee nonsense, so caught up in its clever cleverness that it drives me to distraction. But then again, I like lots of songs for their lyrics, and sometimes, just sometimes, I come across some poetry which just blows me away. I came across Iain Crichton Smith recently at my writing group. I live in Scotland, and the other members of the group were all saying that Smith is so much covered in Scottish English (and Gaelic) classes that people don't tend to notice the beauty of his poetry. I didn't go to school in Scotland. The poets I studied at school were people like Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley. I don't recall ever coming across anything like this. That said, I'm not sure that as a teenager I would have noticed it. Perhaps you have to have some i...