Negotiating Right of Way on Iona
Living in Community
Green-veined White
Abrachian
Negotiating Right of Way on Iona It's before-dawn, feels like night, I'm on the early run for the luggage from the Mac. After the start-up roar the van's quietly chugging by the gate: the routine drive-through, the dodgy hand-brake on the sharp slope, the clang as the gate shuts. Now cowpats halved by tyre tracks, the speckled grassy fringes, the haunches of cattle half-buried in the blackness, before the headlight-underworld brims with colour: the bulk of a cow, sideways on, in the road. I drop the revs, foot over brakes, sure she'll shift. A head-turn into the light, a couple of times, but she's stock-still, and so am I. Is this too early? I ease the throttle, edge forward at that wall of brown. With a clumsy jerk and hint of pique, she's gone. Copyright © 2020 Martin Hayden
Living in Community (Cul Shuna: volunteers' accommodation) We return to Cul Shuna from a washed-down kitchen a half-tidied office a mostly-swept shed a cloth-draped laundry a nearly-balanced till to discuss whether there are no bananas because no-one's been for the bananas or because there are no bananas whether the Eucharist is a barbaric survival or a way to be Christ to one another whether it's alright to say it's women's hair clogging up the showers and they should sort it whether the churches crowded for meetings in the East German revolution are now empty for the reason the churches around Thurso are also empty whether we should all agree closing the bag with the aid of that little adhesive tab keeps the cut loaf fresh much longer Copyright © Martin Hayden 29 December 2011
Green-veined White (a found poem, after Jeremy Thomas, The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland, 1991) In sunshine in weak, zig-zag flights he investigates edges: of shrubs, woodland rides, tussock, finds a female. He lands nearby, showers her with 'love-dust' so potent even we can get its scent of lemon verbena. A twirling and a chasing before she lands, signals acceptance by folding her wings. He drags her on a short nuptial flight before they settle, locked in tandem. During mating he smears her with anti-aphrodisiac to keep others away but it's less-potent, short-lived, an attractive female frequently harassed. She can signal rejection by opening her wings wide, holding her abdomen upright at 90 degrees, impossible to mate, but will frequently succumb, wanting fresh doses of anti-aphrodisiac, to lay her eggs in peace. He goes mud-puddling, to replace minerals lost in mating. In a slow, topsy-turvy flight, as if injured, desperate to get airborne, she tastes every plant, seeking the mustard oils of Crucifers, on which she lays. Four or five together, on the underside of a lady's smock seedling sprouting in old hoof-prints in a boggy meadow. Copyright © 2016 Martin Hayden
Abriachan After three days of rain, the roadside rivulets and runnels peat-brown, brimful, surging the long trails of grass caught in their edges (three ten pound notes stuck together in my soapy leather wallet), I saw, in a field above the loch, a ewe with its lamb – not a black-faced-and-wide-eared, but a curly-headed, with the slight chunkiness of the no-longer-new-born. Both had their backs to the prevailing slant, the ewe nonchalantly ripping the grass as if all Scotland's rain had at some time washed through that fleece, the lamb perfecting the soaked-through hunch of the picked-on and early-disappointed. His eyelids flickered, ineffective shutters, his three-legged stance (one front leg flexing with a delicate shiver) a minimal escape from wet earth. The ewe, slightly lifting her head in order to concentrate backwards, shook her heavy fleece like a mat, in a burst of subsiding misty spray. The sleeves of my waterproof close to saturation, I squeezed out the peak of my drenched cloth cap and set off back up the hill into the cloud. Copyright © 2008 Martin Hayden