Tag: Bannockburn

Burns Night

Photo taken at The Battle of Bannockburn Site

Happy Burns night everyone. We didn’t have a traditional supper but we has a wee veggie haggis T.V dinner for lunch.

Burns night seems to be more alive this year than ever. I’ve seen children reciting poetry, various poems shared online and we have just finished watching Janey Godley’s Big Burns Supper. Ye Canne beat it. The highlights for me were Brina and Skerryvore, check them out.

We never celebrated Burns night growing up because it’s the night we lost my Grannie. 40 years today.

Do you celebrate Burns? Is tradition important to you? And how do we weave the thread of our past into our present and our future?

A Scottish Jig

Taken at Bannockburn House

There is so much going on in this photograph and that’s why I took it. It was taken outside the 17th century mansion Bannockburn House. Notice the man in his traditional Scottish dress, the wheelchairs – one neatly placed, one abandoned. Then there is the bike propped under a window beside a 1980’s wire bin.

PROMPT

Using the photograph above, write a short story or poem about arriving late to a party and finding yourself back on 1984. When did you realise and how? Who was there that you haven’t thought about in a long time? How was everyone dressed, what music was playing and what was on the buffet?

Have a ball and happy writing.

Home

Letting The Outside In

20180101_133054.jpg

I’m Letting the Outside In.

The double glazing is stained with winter splatter.
Porridge is cooling in a retro bowl and my bare feet –
Baking from the heat of a sun kissed puppy
Who is baking on a vertically striped carpet.

There is a reek of yesterday’s shenanigans at the burn
Wafting from tartan collars
and the air feels.

Music ripples through my rib cage

There’s washing hanging, half-arsed, on radiators
While a new load spins in the machine.
The sagging rope in the back garden
Is empty. Waiting for the weight of winter warmers

Honestly soaked,
to be nipped with plastic tipped pegs and a satisfying sigh.
I’m letting the outside in.

Three squirrels scurry along the naked trees across the way.
And me
I’m resisting the need to weed the garden
I’m letting the outside in.

©EilidhGClark

The above photograph is my oldest dog Mille, she is a 6 year old chocolate lab.

I published this poem with Anti-Heroin Chic on 25th May 2017.

Wheelie Bin Soup

This poem was published in the UOS Creative Writing anthology yearbook. It also appeared in an exhibition titled Poetry in Windows at the 2019 BIG LIT festival at Gatehouse on Fleet

green trash bin on green grass field
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Nicked, frae below a strummin street licht,

The muckle great bin schrinks low to the grund.

Flashes of blue and orange snap

on its rusty armour. Half foo

it rumbles tae the fit o Randolf crescent where

the pavement sinks beneath  brae, bumpin

ower boulders ,beer cans and deed bracken. Joyriding.

It flips its lid to the moon.

And the moon slides behind a bramble

Bush, and the bush slips behind a tree that

sucks air from the shadows . Released.

Skirting the embankment, teeterin. Then nose-diving heed first,

puking a cocktails o last week’s cardboard shite

into the Bannock burn. Branded confetti drookit,

Dance around the plastic shell celebrating

a liquid grave.

©Eilidh G Clark

Lentil Soup

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Beads of soup-sweat cling

To my arm hair as I hack a hulk of turnip. Slabs of flesh,

sculpted into yellow dice, tumble

onto a hummock of carrots. Resting

On the surface of a simmering pot, a sliced leek splays,

Its silver loops belch hoops of pungent fog.

My window is crying.

The pot hisses and pirouetting lentils rise to the surface and tumble,

Dragging sodden leek down into the rolling stock.

Fists of steam punch the air,

Burst

Then creep and crawl

Around the walls like silver ghosts.  Waving.

I wipe my brow on a dishcloth; toss the root vegetables into the pot

Then open the window,

The smell of autumn  drifts  outside.

©Eilidh G Clark

This poem is published in the Tin Lunchbox mini-mag

%d bloggers like this: