Sheep Poetry

Here are a few sheep poems I wrote a while ago when I was working with sheep. Many solitary times in mud and on the hill mostly burying carcasses!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bobby Grierson

Image
Bobby Grierson- Fantastic Human 'Oh to be here where no dark stain interrupted our lives, we were unfettered and unleashed... young and free with no cares.' (from one of Bobby's last fb posts) I was aware of Bobby first in 1976. Because always, Bobby stood out in a crowd. It was matriculation day at Edinburgh College of Art 1976. The aquiline nose and chin pushing the world out of its way was followed by  a long mop of (sorry Bobby, mousey) Marc Bolan curls. Skin tight jeans to the knee flared to the floor, and a flowing coat. (Aye yi definitley hid flares - dinnae deny it) Bobby had already had a working life before ECA as a lab technician in Cumnock. But like many of us from the small judgemental Scottish towns there was an exciting city world that beckoned. He went to FE college to get the entry qualifications for ECA and was thrown in with a mix of folk and hangers on that would change the cultural and political life of Scotland forever. Bobby w...
Read more

My beautiful Orkney Re-blogged from 2020.

Image
  Most days I can walk through the Stromness street of the, ‘best place to live’, and tourist brochure fame and meet the same man, who as a boy taunted and ridiculed a seven year old black foster child who was living with a family in the town. Around 1969. I don’t blank that man, I say, ‘hello’. There were very few black people in Orkney when I was young and I knew none. But a ‘black’ doctor saved my 6 month old sister’s life in Aberdeen Royal infirmary. She was rushed there with an incurable illness. So from the age of two I grew up with a knowledge of ‘blackness’ that came from outwith Orkney. I still did not understand what the term ‘black’ meant. Ours was a family that stood out as commies, lefties, non church going and ‘dangerous’ to the settled status quo in Orkney. ‘Deep’ Orcadians viewed us suspiciously. I knew that Paul Robeson was the son of a slave, a Shakespearean actor and singer, and about how the American dream of the ‘land of the free’ was a myth. Paul Rob...
Read more

Fish theft and vodka

Edit This Entry Delete This Entry My father used to say the EEC was nothing more than a Tory club. In 1973 I was coveting suede mini- skirts, denim Wrangler jackets and trying to work up the courage to ask him to let me go the ‘Harray’ dance. Harray is the only landlocked parish in Orkney and natives of Harray got the nickname’ Harray Crabs’ as they had no shoreline. (No I don’t know the logic behind it, I suggest you google it). The Harray dance was symbolic of everything that was terrifying to a parent emerging blinking into the 60s and then hurtled into pre-punk 70s. The iniquity of the hall’s reputation   encompassed legendary copulations at the ‘back of the hall’,   imbibing of vodka behind broken toilet doors with secondary spewing in the same location, and a floor running in spilt beer which was de rigeur. Unregulated, even socially condoned underage binging in the macho rural society that was Orkney then, created the perfect storm of authoritarian parenting for some...
Read more