POEM TITLE Blackness Remembered
POEM
I grew up in the crowded isolation of our now abandoned cottage,
Where two hills straddled our lives and all too familiar gossiped roads
Ran down past the loch leading to places we talked of before the
Dying fire, just a stone’s throw from my father
Who daily drowned in the Lobster Pot, a ready teller of his
Misery to any ear with a shilling in its pocket, but with a drink in
His hand he professed to be more than a match for Robert Wilson
And who were we to argue, though his cold comfort failed to stem
The leaking roof of our worsening predicament we knew of no other life,
Here silence screamed frustration and winds bleached black the houses on their cobbled plots,
We took up a whole pew in St Michael’s, carving our names
As if it were our right, Mother, seven of us and him, we had the flat field
Growing our food and our morality,
And rain scored its face into the soul of a headland that pained to resist
And in resisting, stood out against winters dominance, asking nothing but the
Company of man, who toiled at the sod and cast the net,
Like a damp mist from off the sand blown ayre, age closed upon those faces
Still in my mind and filled the graveyard with chiselled names,
As was their right to lie amid a history of my Island folk,
Now I am old I long to go back, I long to stoke the fire and hear my father
Sing Bogies Bonnie Belle, just one more time!
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