Long absence

Two months: Sorry folks, if any folks are still out there!  Too much work, and too much reliance on Facebook. Nearly Christmas, and it has been a long and weary few months. Hoping to give up my work before too long. 34 years last October since I started. I'm still writing like stink and a few things are happening. I'm on Poetry Please on Radio 4 on 22nd December and I am, most excitingly, writing a libretto for an opera due to be performed in Edinburgh in August. Jekyll and Hyde, I'm both!

Was up north last weekend, lovely. Here's a photo and a recent poem.

In the language of this remote area there are many terms for the feeling

you get when you see a grey mist creeping down a cold hill where some wet sheep are waiting stoically

 

 

Drod (n) Dull indefinable feeling of being involved in a scene that prefigures one’s own death, as in ‘This morning my father woke to a peculiar sense of Drod’

Sleugh (n) Psychosomatic, but terrifyingly real, sense of nausea, often experienced in natural surroundings

Drod an sleugh

Fister (verb) To creep sickeningly slowly, like an injured beast, or a disease, as in ‘Uncle Ansel is fistering down the road again’

Fistering drod

Fistering drod an sleugh

Shommers (n) plural (colloquial) a group of things that might be imagined but are very real to the person that experiences them

Shommers o drod

Shommers o drod an fistering sleugh

Dwank (adj) (archaic) Black, sodden, wet, often in relation to a carcass, as in ‘Last night I found a dwank horse’s head under the duvet’.

Dwank shommers o drod

Dwank an fistering shommers o drod

Dwank shommers o fistering drod

Crombled (adj) Crippled, hunched, incapacitated as if by great age or boredom

Crombled wi drod

Flack (verb) To become too weak to move while simultaneously exasperated

Flacking crombled

Flacking crombled wi drod

Flacking crombled wi shommers o drod an fistering sleugh