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Gillian Craig
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the poet
Gillian Craig is a Scottish poet and author who spent 20 years in the Middle East, South East Asia and East Asia. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including New Writing Scotland, Orbis, Abridged and Black Bough Poetry. Gillian is also a children’s author and poet, with four books published by Marshall Cavendish as Gillian Spiller. She currently lives in Scotland with her daughter, and is writing her first novel.
the poems
Helen, by accident
On a windscourged
Scottish shore, Hogmanay,
three lists brightly wrapped in leftovers.
A fire in a biscuit tin,
beacon in the storm
sparked, smouldered, caught the wishes,
snatched them away:
a little hope visible as smoke.
I intended the catharsis of fireballs; the forgiveness of krathongs.
Instead, it seems I stood on the beach
in this now foreign land
where I’d screamed despair to the howling dark
two nights before,
and unwittingly vowed to burn it all down.
Return to Saigon
On the long island
I too am stranded on,
he scans the gaudy propaganda,
with its flat figures, stirring sentiments.
The traffic laps the kerb.
Later a book and a drink
and I sit across the street,
thinking of the old white castaway,
and see him still on the same island,
gazing at the traffic.
He gives two bright young travellers
friendly directions and a story;
they laugh and thank and leave him.
He resumes his post,
staring into hypnotic wheels.
('I've been waiting since early morning to transfer power to you,'
said Duong Van Minh,
surrendering the South in 1976.)
I know, although I do not know,
he is no stranger here,
and yet seems lost, waiting,
watching the road now, not the traffic,
for some sign he is remembered too.
Eyes trained on the ground,
he could be looking
with young eyes again,
when life was fierce, and any evening wheels
could carry a friend, a foe, a flame, himself.
As long, it seems, as he is peaceful,
makes no sudden movements,
things may rearrange themselves
with their former brutal clarity.
He bows a final look at what was lost.
('Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you no longer have,'
said Colonel Bui Tin,
cutting the strings, tying loose ends.)
Stupit fucken wurds
A man sprawled
on the station bench
indistinctly opining,
gleefully goading you
as only a 3pm drunk in
hi-vis can or does.
When your vape shattered,
punctuated the platform,
I thought it was a semicolon;
I expected something more.
The Glasgow train was
approaching platform 1.
See stupit fucken wurds.
That was it. No explosion.
A slumped smoulder of despair.
The carriage gulped,
shunted you on to
Kilwinning or beyond.
Words can wound, tear,
set light winds of fury,
we cleave, hew, bark,
we resent the toll
the sewers we cross exact.
We are so often misunderstood.
But I wish you knew
thae stupit fucken wurds
were a poem. That’s all it is:
the right words
delivered perfectly
at the right time.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb