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. 317
An Uamh Bhin
Fingal’s cave
A volcanic cathedral
Risen out of the Hebridean Atlantic
Staffa’s solidified lava, contracted and fractured
Fashioned into honed hexagonal steps and lofty basalt pillars
Lightly landing on the precarious jetty void of day trippers
We followed the mystical path of matte black hexagons
Guillemots and gannets for company
Greeted by the great doorway
A gash in the pilaster rocks
A vast vestibule,
stranger than
Sagrada Familia
Transfixed
Senses enthralled
This cavernous basalt basilica
With its eerie echoing emerald liturgy
Walls and ceilings lined with intricate carvings made by the sea
Magnificence beyond belief, mystical concertos of crashing, sloshing waves
Luminous green water stirring like a velvet cloth, slashed with foam
Iona’s Abbey framed in the preternatural doorway
Curiously
Coloured fresco ceilings
Like glorious bygone Byzantine mosaics
Uamh Bhin – the transcendental, supernatural ‘melodious cave’.
Amanda Barge
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. 316
The Course of Life
A river is a one-way kind of thing.
It starts off small,
somewhere nobody has ever heard of,
sometimes, somewhere with no name to speak of,
some place no-one wants to visit at all.
Before you know it, it’s all grown up.
On a map,
with capital letters,
and some (added) responsibilities.
If you are lucky,
you get to see your river meet the sea.
See it twinkle and rage.
Watch it lap, look back and wave.
Sarah L. Dolan
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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. 315
go-around
The flying fish rise in silence,
at thirty-five hundred feet,
wind shielded in a near gale,
until they skein by my side.
Condensing like a myth
born from Maol’s upland ocean,
in crisp naval monochromes,
three dozen barnacles bank as one.
They vee downwind southerly,
leaving me grinning like a loon.
It’s only a practice ring-around,
but their pinions sing for Svalbard.
Steve Smart
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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. 314
Alloa: Past and Present
Look aboot ye, see the changes
A town well set, north side of the Forth,
Shipyards, harbour and a trading port to Europe
A multitude of industry, swallowed up and swept away.
Economy relied and thrived on the trade
But competition grew and the factories closed,
Breweries, textiles and mines were all affected,
Finalising the closure of our well loved railway line.
Look aboot ye, see the changes
Retail and leisure is now what we do.
Football, golf courses, swimming and fitness
Supermarkets, new train station, Wi-Fi and queues.
Gone are the old schools, replaced with the new
Raised sculptures that symbolise the changes to come,
But the A listed glassworks, town hall and tower,
Survived picture houses, cobble streets and toilets underground.
Marie Carmichael
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. 313
The Sound of Sollas
I'm calling you from Sollas,
where the winds are
walking us hard, and the sands'
tide-calming expanse laughs
at all purpose and pace.
The sun's broken through
- to this birthplace
of your grandfather; a visiting
sky lends exotic blues
and greens to the sea.
Not of a mind to return,
to see childhood summers
overgrown, the machair's
memories not your own, old
haunts inhabited, ruins now built
upon, you have stayed
away some sixty years.
So I'm calling you from Sollas,
a mobile to my ear, to bring you
the waves just in - as they break
around the sound of me.
The winds are shooing shadows
across the bay, swift to deny them
the time of day, the faintest signal
could get blown; they're breaking up
the syntax of my thinking, buffeting
my intention. But it's ringing out
now: seconds stand
to connect you to here,
restore the downed line
to then. I pick up the click,
make my own voice
out back home:
"Sorry we can't come to the phone...";
and the great curling surf comes washing in
- inexorable as the tone.
Mora Maclean
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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. 312
Playtime
out they come
small Lowry shapes
run, leap, hop,
shriek like trains
giddily gyrate
furiously skip
or stand in groups
in the rain
loud from a livid sky
thunder rolls and crashes
lightning flings its baton,
scatters them
like birds
with broken wings
they hear an anxious bell that calls them in
magnetised, they move,
iron filings to the door
but one boy
halts
gazes at the sky,
wet hands dripping.
Ann Rawson
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.