JC Milne

Isle of Barra, Scotland 

JC Milne has lived most of her life in the Isle of Barra in the Western Isles of Scotland.  She has previously contributed articles and poems to Scottish Islands Explorer magazine, under her then name ‘Jeanne Grant’.  At that time she was asked to write a serial for the community website that had just been set up, which led her into self-publishing.  Her writings include a full-length novel, a collection of short stories and, to date, two illustrated books for children.  At present she is editing a collection of poems.

Three poems - 9th April 2020  -  Winging It    8th May 2020  Shed    13th July.2020 Lignite

Poem written 9^th April 2020

 

Winging It                                          

 

A direct line of sound, audible, in settled day;

a sure, distinct, salute; such as might delineate

Scarlatti’s aria flight, conjure Mozart’s flute to play,

cajole Callas to sing; describe the birth of light.

Sonata, operetta, spun, swung, in excelsis

from meadow pipit, insistent on the wing. 

 

The sky was filled and joined with orchestra of song,

the road was silenced from its general cacophany,

and quiet, save for soft, exploratory, human tread,

where once was sudden clamour, roar and speed;

and plethora of birds made strong their harmony

and high applause for this old land, new restored

to clarity of flight and call, of snipe and curlew,

of lapwing, skylark, diver, sparrow, finch and dove,

the polished drake in flurry rising green and gold,

the lonely heron with his warning cry reserved; all

songsters and citizens of a cherished world.

 

 

Poem written 8^th May 2020.

 

Shed                    

 

I stand abstracted in the shed, a garden fork

shining in my hand; I polish the prongs, each

a small pleasure.  Standing, my steps expand;

large like a moon-walker down the years,

to a playhouse, clubhouse, den; the shed.

 

It was the range and tidiness; the scent of grass,

and earth in the grain; in the wooden walls,

in the floor on which we sat, pervading all

adventures; earth, preserved in dryness till

the gentle rain embellish, wetness fertilise.

 

Falling rain now, release; because despair lies

in a land far from tears, beyond apaisement;

so the rain caresses, like the deity created

by a thirst.  Like the garden tools he hangs,

from a nail, ready for use, for embellishment.

 

 

Date poem finished         13th July.2020

Lignite

 

Garzweiler; a legalised extinction, open wound,                                                                

where five-and-twenty miles were girded round                                               

no stately pleasure-dome, but slash of mine.                                                      

Farmsteads scythed, here in the fertile Rhine,                                                    

hamlets melded to a scar of barren ground,                                                         

detritus of an idyll that exalted orchard, field,                                                    

steepled churches’ yield.  Hear the last bells toll;

twenty villages churned, for twenty years of coal.

                                               

Hambach, late a forest: now, likeness of a war   

in invaded lands a hundred years before;             

where men permitted to be maimed or slain,     

as here were by-products of momentary gain.

Accustomed ways they kept will hold no more,

their image stark against a mechanised command.

In this ravaged span the weak and old are razed,                                                               

new denizens of No Man’s Land, to die betrayed.

 

A century and more ago, in peaceful Immerath,

grazed with red-walled farms, hazed with sunlit paths,

the people built St Lambert’s Church, its ancient bells

a solid breath of certainty, birth, faith, escorted death;

to be displaced.  A hundred fruit trees felled, in Otzenrath;

In Pödelwitz roofs that stood eight hundred years,

return as trees; Berverath will flood, sink without trace,

its epitaph made plain: emotion, loss, are out of place.

 

This vista, spread of hell; a man-made desolation,

canvas of abandon; a modern desecration,

a massacre of earth;  as if there had not been,

that other church that spewed out blood and brain,

whose name, become libation, stains and curls

the roll of infamy the flightless angels keep,

marble justices inured against a wild distress

too great for recompense, forgiveness or redress.

 

The people slaughtered there, in quiet Oradour,

lie below this savaged Saxony; a manufactured slur,

from stench of war to wealth of coal adroitly played,

heritage bequeathed to flood and waste, flayed

by bloodless writ; pogrom of farms by legislature.   

In Oradour they will have hailed the heavenly dome,

which spurned their plight, which turned from sight

of hell that hurled; smaller, here, the death of home.

 

These hamlets, then, whose names are reckoned dear,

are not pronounced with that same ghastly awe and fear,

as Oradour; not remotely in the same shades framed,

as blood and bone spent and torn; but ancient shame

has not called for or brought a smaller mercy here. 

How to bring a nation back, from such unholy place,

Unless by honing special grace, amends at least begun

by crawling on the knees till sacrificial blood has run?

 

These villages arrayed were dolmens, Heimat, vision;

all that war’s crazed admired. In this sanitised collision

I beg forbearance of the ghosts of Oradour, implying

context with this cold erasure, smooth complicity.

Words bear no weight, convey no holy circumcision.

This coal, though it slays all, gives out in twenty years,

the sky smoke-seared, earth soured, a forest scoured;

the coal itself, its damage just begun, a senseless purge.