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Bill Watkins, Traveling Poet

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Bill Watkins, Traveling Poet

Category Archives: Scottish

The Scottish Frost: Andrew Young…

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Andrew Young, Scottish

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Tags

Joy, Love, Peace

Snow Harvest

The moon that now and then last night
Glanced between clouds in flight
Saw the white harvest that spread over
The stubble fields and even roots and clover.

It climbed the hedges, overflowed
And trespassed on the road,
Weighed down fruit trees and when winds woke
From white-thatched roofs rose in a silver smoke.

How busy is the world today!
Sun reaps, rills bear away
The lovely harvest of the snow
While bushes weep loud tears to see it go

***

The Shepherd’s Hut

Now when I could not find the road
Unless beside it also flowed
This cobbled beck that through the night,
Breaking on stones, makes its own light,

Where blackness in the starlit sky
Is all I know a mountain by,
A shepherd little thinks how far
His lamp is shining like a star.

***

Nightfall on Sedgemoor

The darkness like a guillotine
Descends on the flat earth;
The flocks look white across the rhine
All but one lamb, a negro from its birth.

The pollards hold up in the gloom
Knobbed heads with long stiff hair
That the wind tries to make a broom
To sweep the moon’s faint feather from the air.

What makes the darkness fall so soon
Is not the short March day
Nor the white sheep nor brightening moon,
But long June evenings when I came this way.

***

Walking on the Cliff

But for a sleepy gull that yawned
And spread its wings and dropping disappeared
This evening would have dawned
To the eternity my flesh has feared.

For too intent on a blackcap
Perched like a miser on the yellow furze
High over Birling Gap,
That sang ‘Gold is a blessing not a curse’,

How near I was to stepping over
The brink where the gull dropped to soar beneath,
While now safe as a lover
I walk the cliff-edge arm in arm with Death.

More Andrew Young Poems!!

04 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Andrew Young, Scottish

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Tags

Joy, Love, Peace

The Evening Star

I saw a star shine in bare trees
That stood in their dark effigies;
With voices so clear and close it sang
That like a bird it seemed to hang
Rising and falling with the wind,
Twigs on its rosy breast outlined.

An obvious moon high on the night
And haloed by a rainbow light
Sounded as loud as silver bell
And trees in flight before it fell,
Their shadows straggling on the road
where glacier of soft moonlight flowed.

But moon nor star-untidy sky
Could catch my eye as that star’s eye;
For still I looked on that same star,
That fitful, fiery Lucifer,
Watching with mind as quiet as moss
Its light nailed to a burning cross.

***

The Rain

Fair mornings make false vows!
When to that wood I came
I stood beneath fast-dripping boughs
And watched the green leaves wink
Spilling their heavy drink;
Some flowers to sleeping buds returned,
Some, lit by rain, with clear flames burned;
‘Cuckoo’—again, again
A cuckoo called his name
Behind the waving veil of dismal rain.

The rain bit yellow root
And shone on the blue flints
And dangled like a silver fruit
From blackened twigs and boughs;
I watched those running rows
Splash on the sodden earth and wet
The empty snail shells marked “To let’,
And whitened worms that lay
Like stalks of hyacinths,
The last end of a children’s holiday.

I heard a dead man cough
Not twenty yards away—
(A wool-wet sheep, likely enough,
As I thought afterwards);
But O those shrieking birds!
And how flowers seemed to outstare
Some hidden sun in that dim air,
As sadly the rain soaked
To where the dead man lay
Whose cough a sudden fall of earth had choked.

***

An Evening Walk

I never saw a lovelier sky;
The faces of the passers-by
Shine with gold light as they step west
As though by secret joy possessed,
Some rapture that is not of earth
But in that heavenly climate has its birth.

I know it is the sunlight paints
The faces of these travelling saints,
But shall I hold in cold misprision
The calm and beauty of that vision
Upturned a moment from the sorrow
That makes today today, tomorrow tomorrow?

***

Mole-hills on the Downs

Here earth in her abundance spills
Hills on her hills,
Till every hill is overgrown
With small hills of its own;
Some old with moss and scorpion-grass,
Some new and bare and brown,
And one where I can watch the earth
Like a volcano at its birth
Still rise by falling down;
And as by these small hills I pass
And take them in my stride
I swell with pride,
Till the great hills to which I lift my eyes
Restore my size.

***

The Sunbeams

The tired road climbed the hill
Through trees with light-spots never still,
Gold mouths that drew apart and singled
And ran again and met and mingled,
Two, three or five or seven,
No other way than souls that love in heaven.

Sunny and swift and cool
They danced there like Bethesda’s pool;
Ah, if in those pale kissing suns
My halting feet could bathe but once
No slender stick would crack,
My footstep falling on its brittle back.

***

In Teesdale

No, not tonight,
Not by this fading light,
Not by those high fells where the forces
Fall from the mist like the white tails of horses.

From that dark slack
Where peat-hags gape too black
I turn to where the lighted farm
Holds out through the open door a golden arm.

No, not tonight,
Tomorrow by daylight;
Tonight I fear the fabulous horses
Whose white tails flash down the steep water-courses.

***

Wood and Hill

Nowhere is one alone
And in the closest covert least,
But to the small eye of bird or beast
He will be known;
Today it was for me
A squirrel that embraced a tree
Turning a small head round;
A hare too that ran up the hill,
To his short forelegs level ground,
And with tall ears stood still.
But it was birds I could not see
And larks that tried to stand on air
That made of wood and hill a market-square.

Andrew Young Poems:

01 Thursday May 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Andrew Young, Scottish

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Tags

Joy, Love, Peace

The Green Woodpecker

Whether that popinjay
Screamed now at me or at his mate
I could not rightly say,
Not knowing was it love or was it hate.

I hoped it was not love
But hate that roused that gaudy bird;
For earth I love enough
To crave of her at least an angry word.

***

Loch Luichart

Slioch and Sgurr Mor
Hang in the air in a white chastity
Of cloud and February snow
That less to earth they seem to owe
Than to the pale blue cloud-drift or
The deep blue sky.

Though high and far they stand,
Their shadows over leagues of forest come,
Here, to a purer beauty thinned
In this true mirror, now the wind,
That held it with a shaking hand,
Droops still and dumb.

As I push from the shore
And drift (beneath that buzzard) I climb now
These silver hills for miles and miles,
Breaking hard rock to gentle smiles
With the slow motion of my prow
And dripping oar.

***

In December

I watch the dung-cart stumble by
Leading the harvest to the fields,
That from cow-byre and stall and sty
The farmstead in the winter yields.

Like shocks in a reaped field of rye
The small black heaps of lively dung
Sprinkled in the grass-meadow lie
Licking the air with smoky tongue.

This is Earth’s food that man piles up
And with his fork will thrust on her,
And Earth will lie and slowly sup
With her moist mouth through half the year.

***

The Spider

A single white dewdrop
That hung free on the air sang, Stop!
From twig to twig a speckled spider,
Legged like a hermit-crab, had tied her
Invisible web with WELCOME
For sign, and HOME SWEET HOME.

That spider would not stir,
Villain of her Greek theatre,
Till as I heedlessly brushed past her
She fled fast from her web’s disaster
And from a twig-fork watched it swing,
Wind tangling string with string.

Now she weaves in the dark
With no light lent by a star’s spark
From busy belly more than head
Geometric pattern of thin thread,
A web for wingy midge and fly,
With deadly symmetry.

***

In Moonlight

We sat where boughs waved on the Ground
But made no sound;
‘They cannot shake me off,’
Shrieked the black dwarf,
Impudent elf,
That was the shadow of myself.

I said to him, “We must go now’;
But from his bough
He laughed, securely perched,
‘Then you rise first’;
It seemed to me
He spoke in wicked courtesy.

We rose and ‘Take my hand,’ he whined,
Though like the wind
Each waving bough he leapt;
And as we stept
Down the steep track
He seemed to grow more hunched and black.

“Portrait of David” by J.F. Hendry

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Poem, Poems, Poesia, Poetic Blog, Poetry, Scottish

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Tags

J.F. Hendry, Joy, Love, Peace, Poem, Poetry, Scottish, Scottish Poetry

Out of a lightning void who clutched blue rivers
Spins a shell-flower head on sea-screened floors.
An echo coils an ear in Fingal’s Cave
Along whose flickering shores he plucked his eyes
And hirples lighthouse space down pebbled chin.

His frowning knuckles doubling are the rainbow
Clenching fists of cloudy Scottish thunder.
Ribs, once wrecked ships sunk on a broken beach,
Now swell a chest of treasure in screw sand, or
Blast a southron air with Highland spleen.

Sabre-toothed, the tiger Hebrides thrust
And parry sea.  The sleeping lipline pins
On space awakened purpose, is a mastodon.
A gnarled kneecap, or an elm down a glen,
Forge spring-knots for the kilted saunterers.

Out of the dark-green jar who grasped light arching,
Hoards electric sun in branching arms.
The mottled trunk-one, wrenched from silver birch,
Remembers brindling Cluny in a Braemar storm,
Fire-talk, venison, we happy winterers.

cave1

“Inverbeg” by J.F. Hendry

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Poem, Poems, Poesia, Poetic Blog, Poetry, Scottish

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Tags

J.F. Hendry, Joy, Love, Peace, Poetry, Scotland, Scottish Poetry

Sliced with shade and scarred with snow
A mountain breaks like Mosaic rock
And through the lilt of mist there flow
Restless rivers of pebble, pocked
And speckled, where moss and the centuries grow.

Tree, married to cloud as stem is to feather,
Branches and straddles the convex of sky
Death is aflame in the bracken where heather
Rears semaphore smoke into high
Blue messenger fire through soundless weather.

Below, like bees, the ivies swarm,
Cast in leaping veins, their trunk, a crippled
Animal of thighs pounced from loch-water, storms
The slated shores of the past into ripples
Interpreting man’s fretted cuneiform.

loch1

“Ardlogie, Christmas Eve, 1939” by Douglas Young:

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Nature, Poem, Poems, Poesia, Poetic Blog, Poetry, Scottish, Winter

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Tags

Douglas Young, Joy, Love, Peace, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Scottish

winter flowers2

The mild midwinter evening ebbs, leaving
wreckage of gold and purple on the hill.
The full round moon sails up from eastward, cleaving
dim veils of star-split cloud, tenuous and still.

Winter has jewels yet, leaf, flower, and berry,
berberis, holly, crab, and many more;
wych-hazels’ golden straps, a starry cherry,
primroses, heaths, a purple hellebore.

There’s a viburnum by the porch, some vagrant
botanist found in Western Yunnan.
It’s flowering now, exquisitely fragrant,
waxy white umbels, scent of marzipan.

Moon-white the naked beeches tower, wreathing
lichened limbs above the laurel glooms;
beyond the lawn a ground-air faintly breathing
stirs the white torches of the pampas plumes.

About me as I walk an odour lingers
of cypress logs I sawed; the pungent scent
clings in my tweeds, and when I raise my fingers
I get the resinous smell, and am content.

Cock-pheasants from the neighbouring pinewood chortle,
a blackbird whistles from the red-twigged lime.
There’s enough pleasure here for any mortal
with eyes, ears, nose, this mild midwinter-time.

More Scottish — Andrew Young:

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Scottish

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Tags

Joy, Love, Peace

The Echoing Cliff
                                             -by Andrew Young (1885-1971)

White gulls that sit and float,
Each on his shadow like a boat,
Sandpipers, oystercatchers
And herons, those grey stilted watchers,
From loch and corran rise,
And as they scream and squawk abuse
Echo from wooded cliff replies
So clearly that the dark pine boughs,
where goldcrests flit
And owls in drowsy wisdom sit,
Are filled with sea-birds and their cries.

“The Mountain” by Andrew Young

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Scottish

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Tags

Joy, Love, Peace

The burn ran blacker for the snow
And ice-floe on ice-floe
Jangled in heavy lurches
Beneath the claret-coloured birches.

Dark grouse rose becking from the ground,
And deer turned sharp heads round,
The antlers on their brows
Like stunted trees with withered boughs.

I climbed to where the mountain sloped
And long wan bubbles groped
Under the ice’s cover,
A bridge that groaned as I crossed over.

I reached the mist, brighter than day,
That showed a specious way
By narrowing crumbling shelves,
Where rocks grew larger than themselves.

But when I saw the mountain’s spire
Looming through that damp fire,
I left it still unwon
And climbed down to the setting sun.

Andrew Young Poem:

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Scottish

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Tags

Joy, Love, Peace

Loch Brandy
                                         -by Andrew Young (1885-1971)

All day I heard the water talk
From dripping rock to rock
And water in bright snowflakes scatter
On boulders of the black Whitewater;
But louder now than these
The silent scream of the loose tumbling screes.

Grey wave on grey stone hits
And grey moth flits
Moth after moth, but oh,
What floats into that silver glow,
What golden moth
That rises with a strange and majestic sloth?

O heart, why tremble with desire
As on the water shakes that bridge of fire?
The gold moth floats away, too soon
To narrow to a hard white moon
That scarce will light the path
Stumbling to where the cold mist wreaths the strath.

“A Cock Crowing in a Poulterer’s Shop” by John Ferguson

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Bill Watkins in Poem, Poems, Poesia, Poetry, Rare Poems, Scottish

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Tags

Animal Poem, John Ferguson, Joy, Love, Peace, Poem, Poetry, Scottish, Scottish Poetry

Rooster1

He will not see the East catch fire again,
Nor watch the darkening of the drowsy West,
Nor sniff the air with joyous zest,
Nor lead his wives along the grassy lane.

Cooped in a crate, he claps his wings in vain,
Then hangs his crimson head upon his breast;
To-morrow’s sun will see him plucked and dressed,
One of a ghastly row of feathered slain.

O chanticleer, I cannot bear it more;
That crow of anguish, pitiful and stark,
Makes my flesh quail at thy unhappy lot—
The selfsame cry with which thine ancestor
Emptied his soul into the tragic dark
The night that Peter said, ‘I know Him not.’

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