Paperboats Zine

A voice came through the wet, aching wood

where the madman lay − not of burn, bird or fox

nor the cry of taken prey

Imagine endless blue, imagine an absence dumb

with extinction – polar bear, penguin, walrus, whale –

unfrozen oceans where once you could walk from

shore

Sic a drouth, watters recede

tae kythe fitdunts lang hidden,

merks left bi the clauts

o muckle craiturs plowterin

in a shallae sea

It was four o’clock in the late summer morning, still full dark now that the nights were stretching again but greying a little towards dawn.

If your garden grew a plant that won you fat

glossy rosettes, coffee, wine, drugs, and chic

bistro salads nine months a year

I want a protocol for the end

of Eurasian Starlings – clipped tones,

pronouncements and on the grouse moors

well-cured skins should hang at half mast,

Hurtled from high Blamanen by Bergen

to this resting-field at my door,

where they catch breath for the next flight.

The Black Burn’s origins were dark and mysterious. It emerged ten feet broad and several inches deep from between two hedges of scruffy hawthorn

Years since we walked this way. We’ve forgotten

the landmarks; loggers

have cleared much of the woodland.

Bald slopes are littered with tree-trash.

in which I was lost, carrying

a colourless cloud of grief

in a close half-dark. Roots grasped at me;

moss underfoot was radioactive green.

Each autumn our small suburban garden is filled with sycamore seeds. They helicopter down from a mature tree on the green space

wild nature means a place

being no less wild than things are

by their nature

The coca-cola water of this river

pours and pools in sudden calm

between the rocky arms of land,

and here an otter coils

We heard them long before we saw

the squabblers hove into view one night,

white bellied geese, lit from below

It’s been a while since I’ve been out, between work and the weather. Today the sun has emerged. A warm breeze blows down the glen.