Below is a delightful piece written by a wee Scots lass. We think it shows real talent. The poetress, Ellen Blindell, is 9 years old.
Doric ode to Grandmas
Grandma, I wid like tae say, hae a braw mither’s day
Read this poem and ye’ll see, jist hae much ye mean ta me
A present or a lovely meal, disnae show how good I feel
Naebody could love you mare, puddocks, brocks, soos or hare.
Dimwits dinna ken the feeling, when someone’s love is sae appealing
Mithers day is affa rare, but its the day I show ye I care
Auld fowk dinna gae oot as much, but Mither's day, it means sae much
Sae tak this hame, put it where ye'll see, an ye'll ken jist whit ye mean tae me.
Unless you can equal the music of this person's poetry forget it. We are not really interested in the poetry of people who have a paucity of language, who seem to think poetry is prose written in short lines to look like verse. There must be alliteration, sprung ryhthm, a wide use of vocabulary and, if the meaning is a little hard to fathom -- well never mind, so long as when read aloud it sounds wonderful.
Poetry is "The Music of Words" (Estron Bard Eisteddfod winner twice)
I know Caitlin Thomas wrote, "Left Over Life To Kill," but I wished to be more positive.
Left Over Life To Fill
On a table in a solitary bedroom
Lies a bright, bright model,
It is, like him, half-finished.
But bright and shining in
The new day's dawn, it holds,
Fixed, impervious to Time
His Joy, His promise, His craft.
On a heartstain of a somewhen
of a silvered yesterday are
Etched the clear cut joys, each
fine and sharp, marking every
Second, so none may risk mistake
But know His Love and care
Drove all shadows from the darkest night.
The imprint of his wit, will golden
Glow, and with His gentle care, that
Others who lay hurt or saddened
By Life's fortunes, felt in fullness
For he gave himself to all in
Total generosity. His laugh bell-pealed
And drove that dark, dark impostor
Gloom, away - and brought back
The sun to those lives were
Grief-Shadowed and darkly desolate
So, let Joy, his love, reign in warm
close memory when grief's pain
Has been stilled and washed by tears.
And those tears to laughter turned,
By the joyful calling of his voice
Across the timelessness of
His Eternity.
For Owen who died aged 16, 1st. Sept. 93. Later his friends told me I had caught his bright young soul. He was hit by truck on his way to school.
Children of the Barren Womb
Beneath the yellow woman
bleeding her burning offspring
through the catafalque air.
The naked sand lay, honed
to a fine glaze
And in the evanescent reality,
dwarfed by dreams,
She sheds her unseen threads
of fireclay, bound and twisted
in the rack-rolled belly of the heat.
Stripped and plumed, majestic,
by the granulated centuries
Stone silent.
Rippled and night-haunted by
the viscous moon,
The sentient viscera
Sucked day-dry by the drifting
Sweatless air,
Is sullied, vitiated,
Piece by piece solidified
into
A disparate totality.
Lapis Lazuli
The sons and daughters of the Lapis Lazuli,
Spoke,
Sounding out the old tin drum
Of an aching old concupiscence
And, in the folded run,
Hatred,
Bound in its mummy cloths of conscience,
Waited for the resurrection.
A nodding
Cold
Protection,
Affording hope within the race's breast.
So they wept with all the rest.
On patterned plains, eking out the best.
Why should the beckoning be ignored?
Why should the link they cannot find,
remind them of their
Finality of mind?
Until at last, the brightest jewel becomes resigned
To be nothing but a setting in a ring,
A pleasant thing.
And will you bring
From off the desert floor,
From off the split-seas' back,
From off the terrifying rack
A naked gem stone,
Uncut and fine,
And then attach the 'possessive' pronoun
Mine?
And hail it as a godly sign!?
Remember,
Lapis Lazuli,
The mud and heat, that present at your birth,
Was torn,
Was ripped,
Was wrenched,
From the weeping circle of the Earth.
Onward Go On
Hell and damnation, words stick in my throat.
Frustrated by noise, and twisted by thought.
Funny dreams drifting, floating impossible,
High in low realms, of astralic planes.
Unbalanced Minds and screaming Hysterics
Muttering curses to peculiar gods.
Yellow clay pipes adorned with much smoking
Black mouthed and burned, by a flickering match.
Repeated by thoughts until vested in silence,
The struggle for verse eases up in its pace.
Now like a snowball rolling on ever forwards,
Down, like a plummet to destruction, its end.
Little black bags, reach out, try to catch me,
But laughing I jump, far out of their arms.
Sweetish the smell where the pen scratches paper.
Creased in the centre, the pages are curled.
Out in the garden the sunlight drifts downwards,
Filling my eyes with a shadowy light.
Now in the blackness a lustre recalls me,
To see what the night and the climax can bring.
Roll upon roll the thought surges forwards,
Ecstatic, I break on the hot cliff of joy.
Remembering the pattern of poets before me
I shiver in sudden of realised fame.
Where shall I die, in personal danger?
What shall I do in this putrescent age?
Scream if you dare as the horror confronts you,
Tremble and quake, and shout with remorse.
Rough grows your voice and purple your anger,
Rattles your throat in a spasm of rage.
Heavily breathing as the plasm approaches.
Sweating and shaking and biting my nails.
Snakes in my stomach my intestines devouring.
And the verve of creating in temper unfurls.
Hurry, oh hurry, find pen and a paper.
Return to the mind and its own solitude.
Write fast and write clear so it's readable after.
Come, please, oh come let lines flow from my hand.
Up in the void with the blackness around me
Shapes swirl in the mist like the dreams of a year.
Pen on the paper as light starts to filter
And clouds of high sound, ring loud in my ear.
Blind are my eyes, to all but my paper.
Deaf are my ears, to all but my thoughts.
Alone in volume of frenzied creation,
Darkness wells up, and Onward, go on.