Tag Archives: Scotland

Selkie by David J. Costello

20 Friday Nov 2015

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Selkie

He used to stand by the quayside
watching the water peel shadows,
his dull pelt dappling the surface.
He wondered where it went,
why the dawn returned it.

He thought himself cursed.
A liquid Prometheus
flayed and made whole.
Flayed and made whole.

He felt the tide move in him,
the moon play with his watery core,
his skin ease from his meat
to shrivel where he stood
so he could fillet water like a knife.

 

David J. Costello lives in Wallasey, Merseyside, England. He is a member of Chester Poets. David has been widely published on-line and in print including Prole, The Penny Dreadful, Shooter, Magma and Envoi. David is a previous winner of the Welsh International Poetry Competition and received a special commendation in the year’s competition. His debut pamphlet, Human Engineering, was published by Thynks Publishing in October 2013. A second pamphlet will appear in September 2016 from Red Squirrel Press.

The Glaistig by Maggie Mackay

21 Friday Aug 2015

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The Glaistig

We please her at the gloaming by the pond
with a pool of milk in a millstone cradle
not warm at all or scorn-boiled.
Solstice, all seasons, each generation.

We flatten against the standing stone
never knowing how she might appear,
always in her favoured green, plaid wafting in Atlantic surge,
or what her mood might be, grey or blue or gold.

We wait for the wailing or the tricks or her
fixing on our scent. Dragonflies and moths
hover on her heartbeat. Deer dart into the ether,
a distant fiddler strums a jig through the indigo.

 

*Originally appeared on The Open Mouse / Poetry Scotland, April 2015

Maggie Mackay, a Scot with wanderlust, a love of jazz and a good malt, has been published in All Write Then’s anthology Still Me…(www.pewter-rose-press.com), was the winner of the Writers’ Circle Anthology Award 2014, and has work in various publications, Open Mouse, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Bare Fiction, The Interpreter’s House ,Obsessed with Pipework and The Lake with work forthcoming in The Screech Owl. She is at Manchester Metropolitan University taking an MA in Poetry, and is a co-editor of Word Bohemia (www.wordbohemia.co.uk)

Kelpie by Rebecca Gethin

19 Sunday Jul 2015

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Kelpie

Out of the rain a colt appeared on the shore –
he’d trotted through the bog on cupped hooves
that let him skim across suck and squelch.

In the sea’s dusk his eyes shone and the skin
inside his nostrils flared shell-pink -
he sniffed the air around me, stepped closer

and as he breathed out I smelled the seascape
from his lungs. Sensitive as raw mussel
he whiffled my hand. I stretched up

to stroke his neck and my fingers felt salt grains
in the fur. Wheeling above, gulls crackled
like bladder wrack. He turned towards

the water’s edge and seemed to beckon,
shaking out his weed-locked mane.
Waves ran over the herring flash of his hooves.

He bent down to snuffle his mouth in the water
and when he shook the drops from his lips
I knew his time had come.

 

(shortlisted in the Chagword Poetry Competition)

Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor. Cinnamon Press published her second poetry collection, A Handful of Water, in 2013. Her first novel, Liar Dice, won the Cinnamon Press Novel Award, and her second, What the horses heard, was published in 2014. New poems have appeared in Prole, The Interpreter’s House and Lighthouse as well as Her Wings of Glass, the Exeter Poetry Festival anthology, the Battered Moons Competition pamphlet and The Broadsheet. Her website is www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com

Fianna! by Fiona Russell Dodwell

20 Wednesday May 2015

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Fianna!

through winters spent watching ‘round fires not your own
keep silent your stewardship, never be found

though hip-deep in mud as spears fly at your brow
stand firm unhurt; be unblemished; don’t frown

though nine ride through forests to tear off your braids
you leave them untied; you leave them unbound

though crisp twigs and dry leaves, they crackle and split
run leaving no trace; run making no sound

though skittish and deer-like you flit over land
inhabit a burrow; inherit the ground

though the clans fight with fervour, and you are their bait
stay in between – both divide and surround

though the pain is too much as you race through the briars
pluck the thorns from your feet without slowing down

though their disbelief weakens you, and could confound
leap clear over giants; slide around clowns

though the mountain is wet and cold mist clouds the pass
yet see it all clearly; don’t slip; take the crown

these trials are hard, they would fox your best hounds
but carry this off and your people won’t drown

 

Fiona Russell Dodwell is from Fife and lives in the Fens. She has had poems published in IS&T and Earthlines (online). She attempts to write from the ‘felt’ sense, and explore how text contacts body and environment.

Sailing to the Isle of Gometra by Seth Crook

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Sailing to the Isle of Gometra

4 knots to 4.5.
With the fourth sail, 5.
Shearwaters almost slide
across the surface,
polishing their way through air.

Gannets climb,
gannets dive.
Sea birds seem like minor gods
summoning the gusts
to flex and ride.

And swimming by:
a water horse,
whose gentle wake’s
a giant wave
crashing through our minds.

 

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before deciding to move to the Hebrides. His poems appear in recent editions of Envoi, Magma, Gutter, The Moth, Southlight, The Journal, Poetry Bus, Prole, New Writing Scotland, and on-line in such fine e-zines as Antiphon, Snakeskin, and Ink, Sweat and Tears.

The kelpie whisperer by Kiley Creekmore

23 Friday Jan 2015

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The kelpie whisperer

Down by the sea
lived a lost pony…

And she was lonely.
Mane tinged with sea froth and weed.
She whispered to me
songs of land;
songs of stones and sticks.
Bad people. Bad things.
The hurt. The hunger.
I listened
and learned how to hold my breath.
Counted to one thousand.
“I want to take you to my home…
my heart is at the bottom of the sea.”
She told me.
I could never resist a mare
with the melancholic.
With my face in mane we plunged.
Galloped to the seabed.
Our hearts became one.

Deep in the sea
lived a pony and her boy Tyree…

 

 

Kiley Creekmore writes poems, as long as they don’t first get lost in the network of wormholes in the cosmos of her brain.