The Crofter’s Daughter
The teacher, plump, his jacket sad
with pipe smoke, brings her to the class.
I’d like us to welcome our little Hebridean.
It’s kindly meant. Indeed the class,
eleven years old themselves, are kind enough.
But there are so many, just so many children,
hundreds, a thousand, in that steel town school.
Passing from bell to bell, from week to week,
she likes learning Welsh, likes the crafts,
but she puzzles over rugby and the steel town’s lust
for such a muddy, heavy game. In Cornaig School,
they’d played rounders, twenty of them.
And then her mind rushes to the island,
where the white sandy machair spread
down the furlong from their farmyard
to the beach. They had dogs with island names,
Jura, Tobermory. And she’d be milking in the byre
before she went to school.
Now the steel town
and a couple of years’ unrecognised damnation.
The History Teacher’s Tobacco Pouch
He’d spread a plump tobacco pouch
before him, lunch times, at bridge,
rubbing out the warm brown curls
of Erinmore, letting float a light
Virginian scent, then tamping,
tamping down, pressing the orange
threads to service in the deep and blackened
bowl of his meerschaum. He liked
breast pocket handkerchiefs, ensigns
of red and purple, tilting oddly
askew by morning break. His nail file
would fire puffs of dust from his
pink, scrubbed nails. Only when the
lunch time bivouac had ended, would
he return to what he knew was always
there: the classroom door, the cruelty.
* Both poems appeared in Roundyhouse in 2012.