During our last Annual Exhibition members of the poetry group Words on Canvas came along to view the art works and responded in poetry.

There should have been an evening of both genres of artists coming together the read the poetry and exchange thoughts on the art work but the Beast from the East had other ideas and the evening couldn’t go ahead.

The next few RSW bogs will be to showcase the talented work of the poets from our last exhibition and as taster for the next poetry evening, planned for November 29th!  More on that later….

https://www.rsw.org.uk/artist/marianlevenrsarsw/

 

Helen Boden, after Marian Leven, Rippling Landward

Frontal

 

the illusion of an island inverted

on a sudden horizon

inked-up seas where kelpies taunt

the ferry’s wake

the old man is retelling tales

caravans

huts       toppling off

raised beaches

sandbanks         falling tides

 

late afternoon       weather

that maps call an occlusion       comes in

in a smirr of suburban nets

not the grand-theatre drapes

that closed on us day after day last month

 

foreshore

unforms       reforms

recomposes

a clachan      a woodland

the old man’s croft house in Applecross

whose windows out-face storms

 

hints at the habitation we must reach

between blunt-profiled headlands       rubhas

Stoer     Hoy       Clo Mhor

that maps call promontories or peninsulas or points

 

outwit the current

round the headland   up the sound

on trunkroad tide     deepening channel

Loch Inchard         Roag     Laxford

hints of habitation

some Tigh na Mara we could reach

some beach to make safe landing

 

coast sharpens       softens        sharpens     monochrome         tint       grey

 

and how those few shorelights coalesce

into a town’s worth       like the old man said

when you take off your glasses

 

hint of a chain pier

 

repeat           fade