Jane's Writing Shed.

I'm picky about the poems that I really like and one of my criteria is that a poem should have a sublime quality. The dictionary definition states that sublime means 'very high quality' which doesn't begin to describe what I mean by the word. After all one person's 'high quality' is another person's gobblydegook. My definition would include transcendence, taking me somewhere beyond words, provoking images or memories which are unexpected. Some of Elizabeth Bishop's and Michael Longley's poems have that sublime quality which take my breath away. Jorie Graham's poem Sundown also knocks my socks off. Here's an excerpt, Sometimes the day                                             light winces                                                     ...

After the rain Between the dark wood and caravan park, behind the beach at Yellowcraig, a field of corn was cut for another year, leaving pale gold stubble rows, ripe for raiding rooks and crows. As a hare sidled onto the far side  of the field it  kept nibbling as birds  dropped  down  around it. Then rain stomped down in furrows and I lost sight of the hare until looking up after the storm,  there  it was, paws outstretched, a cloud-hare sparring with  a cloud-crow  as stratus torn and holed was shot through with partial rainbows.

We've been visiting the Hundy Mundy Natural Woodland Burial Site near Kelso for several years since a dear young relative was buried there. This poem is for Albert. Hundy Mundy Burial Site Once here the dead become cocooned  inside  the earth. They shelter in grassed- over kists  within high stands of beech,  pine  and oak.  There are no tidy rows  and each lies  entirely  alone  on their own  meridian.  Their eulogies are written  in softening inscriptions  on flat-bedded  stones with wildflowers  and pine cones.  And in the last clearing  on the hill surrounded   by the Lammermuirs,  Eildons  and Cheviots,  there's a gothic folly named  for a Pictish Princess,  Hunimundias. I like to think the crows and rooks help to oversee this place which always welcomes, always waits.

Watching On a day when the News is full of horror and fear is more diffuse than ever,  I notice  the old jetty posts rotting in the mud  at Tyninghame  estuary  and abandoned World War Two concrete blocks at the edge of the wood.  Countless dead crustaceans  caught  in nets of grass are  scooped up in the strand-line  among the marran  and cockle sand. A dozen herons  are studying  the saltmarsh pools as an egret drifts away flying further round the spit. Dunlin feed on the  edge  of the incoming tide and like insects fly  as one when disturbed.  Then as the cries of curlew,  tern and geese wash through, I realise  I've lost sight  of what's happening beyond here, for now.

I love Edwin Morgan's poem ' A Too Hot Summer' for its feeling of sticky heat, mystery and the unsettling image of a dog, so I set myself a challenge to write a poem with the same title. I like the idea of writing poems based on the titles of poems written by loved and dead poets, so may write more on this theme. A Too Hot Summer Bright and strange as a thin fox out in daylight, glamour runs a leery path, beyond the hedge and unmown grass. Walking on stick-stiff legs, the fox ignores the hens staring from their pen, instead, like a dog, casually sits scratching an ear. July is a longed-for creature, flaunting its torrid colours, setting a trail  into every summer gone, energising pollinators, presaging autumn.

Last night whilst reading The Music of what happens, Poems from The Listener 1965 - 1980, edited by Derwent May, I came across this poem by Edwin Morgan, which feels very fitting for our fabulous and (almost) too hot summer. A Too Hot Summer A car came hooting slowly not upended and it was a summer lane with limes dusted down. Lazy boys yawned in tree-forts, tumbled suddenly to the impertinence of the windshield and the horn, for looking out it was a dog. How acoustic the recording-room was till they slid back a noisy panel, shrubbery girls in fishnets looked up with sandwiches, chewing the shirt-sleeves of the producer there surely but looking out it was a dog. The first pony stood, shook its reins. The butcher's daughters cried sweetly to it to advance, came off to tug, then showed their rougher natures by the betting shop and looking out it was a dog. Two lovers took the wood to pieces running out of the quarrelling time from the landmark trunk the lightn...

YES for self-determination, we have our parliament, we are a nation. YES to alleviating poverty, caring before profit, a lot more humanity. YES to keep the NHS, free tuition, oil and gas. YES to well-funded childcare, a living wage, decent pensions and welfare. YES to a nuclear-free future, more renewables, from wind, sun and sea. YES to jobs for all the kids, give them hope, and apprenticeships. YES to holding out a hand to immigrants, from every land. It's not about the SNP, Tories, Labour, UKIP, the Greens or any other party, it's bigger than all of them, YES for Scotland's future, you and me.