Poetry Map
We all know poems about Scotland but can the shape and nature of Scotland be drawn entirely in poetry? StAnza has set itself the challenge to see if this is the case. Find out more about the project and how to submit your poem by clicking here, or browse the poems using the map. Latest poems are listed below.
Poetry Map of Scotland: poem no. 393
On Gillies Hill
More than familiar ties
attract me to this crag.
Ancestral voices drag me back.
I face far more
than four encompassed points
from this high wooded cliff.
Seen
The chequered spaces of the farmed carse
stretch south, snaked through
by ribboned windings of the Forth;
and, to the north,
flows to the feet of far, known mountain peaks:
Ben Vorlich, Ben Venue, Ben Ledi.
Remnants of small volcanoes -
fire and brimstone -
heap the river plain, now here, now there,
with leafy, ancient evidence:
Craigforth, the Wallace Monument, King's Park.
Brown velvet moorland, sewn with sheep,
slopes up towards the west.
Dark eastern ramparts of the Ochil Hills
protect the downward glaciated line
of Castle Rock and town.
Remembered
Memory looks down
whenever I come home to this known ledge.
It walks each time along the ridge,
stalks soft across the upland heathered fields,
marches away, beyond the silhouetted blue horizoned edge
of the child's vision;
watches, in the deep doved woods, the wee girl -
drowned in lipstick, high heels, Sunday hat -
listens to her tap-dance singing
on the big stage stone,
to an audience of trees;
lies, easeful, in the yellow grain below,
with the first sharp sweetnesses
of love,
all through a long, slow,
summer afternoon.
Sensed
But there's a deeper tune.
Chords resound far, far beneath
self-generated echoes.
Sheathed in the earth, the woven fabric
is stretched paper-thin.
Within the second of an eyelid opening, closing,
the outward skin drops, layer by layer,
exposing more, and more.
High, ritual platforms, lashed among the pines,
flash on an atavistic, primal wing,
sway once upon the wind and disappear.
Time slips, uncertain, falls:
races, without hour, or day or year,
calls along channels present, future, past,
and fades in the soundless corridors of space.
In this place, life maps - charts of souls -
are, in the end, mere fragments
in the vast depository
of the old world's age;
its story, leafed and bound,
rolled up within the rib bones
of this stone hill vault,
page on unending page.
Irene Paterson Fletcher
View our full map of Scotland in Poems as it grows »
For instructions on how to submit your own poems, click here
All poems from our Poetry Map of Scotland are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet's permission.
Poetry Map of Scotland: poem no. 392
Five Bar Gate
Diane tried to make it from the countryside
Got to the Valley rather late
Everyone was up on the YMCA floor
Dancing to the five bar gate.
Jimmy got lost near the Novar Bar
Stood there drinking very late.
He wanted to dance but he hadn’t the key
To get into the five bar gate.
Sitting in the street near the city sewers
Talking ‘bout you with my mate
We knew you were away with another boy
Dancing to the five bar gate.
John Worling
Author’s Note: If I’d grown up in the Mississippi Delta I’d have grown up with 8 bar blues, but I grew up in Kirkcaldy.
View our full map of Scotland in Poems as it grows »
For instructions on how to submit your own poems, click here
All poems from our Poetry Map of Scotland are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet's permission.
Poetry Map of Scotland: poem no. 391
The Dweller and the Guest
There is no wildlife here, he says.
It is a barren landscape.
A word he has carried
from a distant classroom
along with crevasse,
moraine, erratic.
I turn to the mountains
with a stranger’s eyes,
beseeching a display.
But the cloud is moody, low and grey.
Our beloved Cairngorms
are not on form today.
Are the ptarmigan shy among the rocks?
Have the snow hare melded into moss?
The song of the ring ouzel,
conspicuous in silence.
No snow bunting, no dotterel,
no lime-spattered lichen.
My guest takes pity on me.
We have deer on our city lawns,
he confides. Rabbits, foxes,
badgers, voles. Then he goes
in search of carrot cake
and bacon rolls.
Alone now with the chairlift.
Dormant towers looming
from the mist. The snow plough,
fences, discarded wire. Somehow,
this abandoned playground
had made of me a liar.
But then the Shelter Stone leaned
a roar into the deep of A’an,
where shadows of Macdui rose
to take the soul and shape
of one grey man. And when
the Coires’ shoulders shook
alive, an angry avalanche
of rock came vaulting down.
I called back my guest. Too late.
He had already left for town.
Karen Hodgson Pryce
View our full map of Scotland in Poems as it grows »
For instructions on how to submit your own poems, click here
All poems from our Poetry Map of Scotland are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet's permission.
Poetry Map of Scotland: poem no. 390
Loch Ordie
She is whirls, of
argent and raven,
she is pools of
unbroken eternity,
where jagged pike,
honed abyssal arrows,
consume
blank space.
Here is
Stygian subterfuge, an
onyx underworld, as
midnight anglers (from another world)
attempt to pierce the
primeval meniscus. It is
their calling
from the cave.
O, She is Female!, moulding
herself into lichened glacial
granite,
and insisting upon the
inundation of the
aisles- intellectual
inside this Man-poet.
Liquid,
she is, but deceptive: Muse-elemental.
October moon, lighted within by
blushing Tranquility, illuminates
tiny tragedies below, as forces
erupt,
snagging on lines the necks of men,
dragged, snagged, under, as
pike gallop
across seething surfaces,
in their flight across
millennia,
pursued,
harrowed by ancient fear,
reaching far beyond
articulation.
Garry Stanton
View our full map of Scotland in Poems as it grows »
For instructions on how to submit your own poems, click here
All poems from our Poetry Map of Scotland are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet's permission.
Poetry Map *Global for #StAnza21*: poem no. 389
Waking Up in San Francisco
Dawn cracks open morning,
streaks peach over night’s fading navy.
Out of the half-light, the Nightingale House
looms, gothic and ghostly. No-one knows
what lies behind the closed blinds.
On the street below a lone car
prowls over unseen speed pillows
dips towards downtown.
Headlights stalk shadows
along apartment walls.
Far above the horizon,
the sky pales to washed-out denim.
Tree-lined hilltops
promise forest trails
among Giant Redwoods.
In the distance, the city stirs.
Trams rattle down Market Street,
tinny bells echoing in the crisp air.
The sun hesitates behind clouds
before a sudden downpour.
Angela Blacklock-Brown
View our full map of Scotland in Poems as it grows »
For instructions on how to submit your own poems, click here
All poems from our Poetry Map of Scotland are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet's permission.
Poetry Map *Global for #StAnza21*: poem no. 388
Grianclach – Sun Stone
Midwinter solstice at Newgrange, Ireland 2020
Old bones sleep in frost,
waiting for the turn,
the clockwork
tick-tock-tilt of the earth.
Stone cold sunbathed,
a dagger of light
prying open winter
a precious chink.
Letting in that sharp edge
of hope, a lilt
swelling the womb.
Beat of wings
against the heart’s windowpane.
Fleeting breath, a promise,
air and warmth,
voices unfiltered.
To reach out,
to touch and not draw back
like the beam
tracing the dusty floor.
Gerry Stewart
View our full map of Scotland in Poems as it grows »
For instructions on how to submit your own poems, click here
All poems from our Poetry Map of Scotland are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet's permission.