Northwords Now

Poetry
Photo of a Girl on the Rafah
to Gaza Road
Neil Young
Twelve years on, her face keeps shuffling
Up from a pile of old letters and scraps,
Unnamed, but forever happy and five
Like someone photographed on a school trip
In sandals, T-shirt and khaki shorts
And looking a bit like my girl, could be
Just back from the beach, a birthday party,
Smiling, coy for the camera. But she
Looks out from where the sand is a border
And later, hushed, unreported, I heard
A tank shell struck a water butt here, killed
Two schoolgirls at the roadside where they played;
And I wonder still – what chances this child
Lives now, or lived to another snapped smile?
Glimpse
Mary Wight
I dreamt about my father again,
nothing very dramatic – him
turning to look at me, smiling
that lop-sided way, almost
shy, giving a glimpse of
a boy I recognise
from snaps taken on some hillside
or garden, places I can never name
and he was stretching out a hand –
patient, waiting.
Near Gretna Green
Julian Colton
I glimpse it now from this train
Passing through, the station after Gretna Green –
That ice-crusted short cut lane I ran down in the snow
One star-filled December night before Christmas.
We were moving house again, you had gone ahead
The way you did, still do, unpacking planning.
I took a wrong turn country lane, was lost in the dark
But somehow made my way through to you.
And then, as now, in my stomach and heart
A big fat sadness knot for the way things were, are
Another life, another station bypassed
Always moving on, looking back into the past
Forward to the future, never standing level crossing still
The constant dressing, undressing of a Christmas tree.
Brittle panes cracked beneath my feet.
Favourite Book
Sally Evans
Driving home in the country from Stirling
is like reading a favourite book
as the road greets tree after tree after tree,
turns and sways by hedges and fields,
with sub-plots of glen or track.
A cloth-covered book, well made.
It does not become tatty when the words
and the sentences are known:
the turns, the forks, the continuing river,
road-signs from some old grammar.
Peace is the time it takes to read
a well-loved, fingered, moving story,
the frisson when your village is reached
after ridges and downhill twists,
the gate, the right ending
that somebody wrote long ago.
Returning to Assynt, Thinking of
Arizona
John Bolland
Dryness. A vision of Sidona in the winter.
Turning leaves and red rock magnetised. I tingled
purposeful, relieved, alone. A father.
Here.
Nothing in the state of Arizona moves with so much
expeditious joy as Ullapool this summer Sunday
afternoon – the hurried dispensation of strong drink,
the waitresses’ legs, the record of a squeezebox,
seagulls, sea.
High desert, late November cold -
a fallen forest petrified to jasper. Grey caliche.
The green hills melt to smoke above Loch Broom.
The road ahead’s past Inchnadamph, the Moine Thrust,
towards the basement rock and stillness. Depth.
Grand Canyon
on the coldest day for years – 15 below and snow
dusting the reds and mauves – the goldens – greens of time’s
whimsy – neither grey nor brown – just always
grey and brown – yet in the vision golden, red
or mauve. Above the rim the same runs on forever
now. Rocks of a moment.
I proceed
towards a twist of green-grey gneiss – the music
of a fiddle and hard liquor in a glass.
Shoreline
James Andrew
These waves have had it in for this shore
for some time. After that Atlantic Ocean
of a run up they’ve hammered it.
The hills sit quietly, pretending to darn clouds.
A small, brown bird chatters
about the problem of being a small, brown bird.
It could be a peaceful place if it weren’t for
wind sending sand packing, and waves
wearing more pebbles down.
Last Moorings
John Killick
This one’s past is told
by the tilt of its resting-place –-
important, as if poised
for a mercy-dash, the light
still winking at the masthead;
That one’s scabbily scarred,
crestfallen at such indignity,
like a beached beast,
out of its element;
This one was crushed by a sea:
cracked timbers, a cast-off spar,
the paint patchily peeled by salt;
That one’s been cannibalized
for parts: it lacks a rudder,
and the wheelhouse has lost
its wheel:
– all at sea
in every sense but the real.
Northwords Now Issue 30, Autumn 2015 11