Coruscation
Light accentuates dark.
In winter dawns
I turn on my lamp
and morning rolls over to midnight.
Dark accentuates light.
Relinquishing gloom
I am dazzled
by the lustre of the universe.
It doesn’t matter that
the house burns down in the night
in a preemptive attack on murk.
It doesn’t matter that
hope’s slim candle splutters
on its see-saw dance with dread.
Only my light,
which accentuates
and is accentuated
by dark,
shall pass.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
Moonwalk
Walk now
as you would walk
that first time on the moon,
each step an exploration in
earthlight.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
On the Island
Held with me
between the shock and the wonder,
an oyster-catcher strutting
with his hands behind his back
voicing his concerns,
blowing his vexations
through a child’s first piccolo,
charging with his carrot of alarm.
I watch him conjure
nightmares in the evolutions
of his three stone eggs
to shrivel seaweeds on the shingle bank
that he might dupe a passing crow.
Endless activity and frustration:
always the invention of another thing
to do, another fear, a found distraction,
lest a lurking nothingness confront existence,
reveal itself as certain as a cliff.
Better to be
with the dullness of ignorance
sheltered in conformities of stone.
Better to be
scurrying the greywackes, an anti-hero
screaming decoy presence as a charm.
Caught between the shock
and the wonder,
between the sea and its arc of emptiness,
wind decides the attitude of water,
wipes its moods across a passive sky;
brushes with the linger of a whisper
something that I ache to hear,
but cannot hold,
and ponder why.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
Wetlands
Cloud wipes the moor like a scullery cloth
that never dries; a mildewed caravan
huddles by a breeze-block byre, disused, and
casting slates into the burn’s fermenting froth.
Fences rust on the peat bog; pastures pocked
by marsh grass; ancient run-rigs rut the land,
their ditches full of dim. Like a webbed hand,
a tipped tree reaches roots in rigor, locked.
Grieved spirits of the undeparted drape
the stunted hills, and tempt the midday stones
to glisten should a lustre but escape
the lidded sky, allow the land atone
for troubles done; for I could not mistake
that cottage with its plywood blindfold groan.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
ANGUS D.H.OGILVY
Angus D. H. Ogilvy
Angus was born in Glasgow, grew up in Galloway, and was educated in Edinburgh and Dundee. He has had a career in education which included 25 years as an international school teacher and administrator in Spain, China, Nepal, Indonesia and Zimbabwe. Since winning his school poetry prize in his youth, he has had an abiding interest in poetry and his poems have appeared in various publications. He returned to Edinburgh in 2008 and spends his time writing, doing voluntary work, and addressing conferences, seminars and symposiums about the patient experience of cancer using his poetry as an aid to communication. He has recently published a collection of poems, Lights in the Constellation of the Crab in aid of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.
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