At the Market
‘This was last summer’:
she holds out a bouquet of dried flowers –
woundwort, oregano, lady’s mantle.
‘They will keep their colour for ever’.
Lavender, totter-grass, helichrysum.
Names have their beauty too.
‘Grown from seed in my garden’.
Statice, straw-flowers.
Light in her hand, sunshine incarnate.
Not Just Haiku
Not just haiku
but every poem, should contain a tree
or river, bird or bee
whatever mean abstraction’s at its core.
Like buddleia from concrete,
something green must flourish there,
something with roots: we more than lean
on metaphor. Without it language falls
traceless, like water into the sea.
Road Safety
You too can die on the road
says the dead red squirrel’s
streak of soft pelt
on the hard straight tarmac.
Invisible to us the squirrel’s route
lies at right angles, perhaps
with special signs to indicate
‘cars crossing’. They prove inadequate
as we are when a storm
flings trees about
to hit and kill at random.
I live in Whiting Bay, am married to the painter Nicky Gill. We have 2 children and 4 grandchildren. I decided to be a writer at the age of eleven. Life intervened and although I kept writing and had poems published in for instance, Chapman and New Writing Scotland, it was not until last year that I published my first novel, a detective story called ‘Ivory’ and was commissioned to write a play about the history of Brodick castle for the National Trust for Scotland. This year NTS commissioned another play to commemorate WW1 on Arran and this was performed very successfully at the Community Theatre, Lamlash.
I live in Whiting Bay, am married to the painter Nicky Gill. We have 2 children and 4 grandchildren.
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