Stewart Ennis and I have been working with new Scots and those for whom English is a second language through the Glasgow Life artist-in-residency, hosted by Cranhill Dev Trust in Glasgow’s centre East. We have been working on the theme of Time- all of it online- and this is a collection of process scribbles and shots Stewart has put together while we work on making the notebook to return to participants. What would you say if Time were in the room with you? how does time feel to you today? how does Time move? and is there any such thing anyway right now ….

Thanks to the Scottish Book Trust, Kathryn Welch has been able to place my poetry road signs in her community garden and people make their own

from the title of my current play, Though This Be Madness and the poem, ‘Cusp’:

Cusp

see one or two wash up on Kooljaman at dusk

dune pale

bewildered

renting the shore

clutching a terry-towelling corner

whisked hair bent toward mercury sand

tracing the tail end of a neep tide

quietly foraging for something whole

in tide-chipped curls of home

trawling for perfection

to nestle in a palm

free from panic

depressing

tyres to force

a way through

a forgiving

sand, deeply

resilient

Land Cruiser parked hushed and inappropriate

we dig our heels into a photograph

squint to etch this dusk into memory

peeling layers of rust, ochre, and bone dust

from an unlikely blue – blinking beauty in the face

stumbling, grateful, captivated

Last year for the Scottish Mental Health and Arts Festival, I wrote and performed Though This Be Madness….a play that toys with an attempt to tell you a story through the frame of sleep-deprived motherhood.

ie.

“Once upon a time…

I don’t have time”

There’s poetry in it. Which is why I feel justified posting it here, but I keep wondering what I should blog this post for, when the site was started as a response to working within the queue community in particular. Things have widened up since, and the poems work their way into performances, films, plays, the skin on my coffee and my to-do-list…

off topic.

Though This Be Madness is more like a collection of tales, snippets of nap-time story told in a fractured format, whilst a recovering mum is attempting to soothe her wee one that won’t sleep lying down..on a bounce ball. It is a story about sisterhood. And as is true of the idea of writing about the Titanic while you’re on it, (you just have gargle salt and sing out, soaked), performing it keeps re-surfacing as I bob along the early years of parenting. Most recently, Glasgow’s The Platform, and I think I know where it will turn up next. The piece toys with the ridiculous notion of Staying On the Ball….I get to deflate mine at the end.

It all depends upon how you look at it. This is the last poem in a piece I’ll share this weekend, at Wigtown Book Festival  – This Impossible Rim…and I’m intrigued by what can happen to a poem when you don’t give it a ‘frame’ but simply share it, meaning what you say with those you say it to. I was struck by how much influence the outside had on what I saw in viewing these beautiful paintings in Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland. We (the bus tour folk and I) were on route during Spring Fling, earlier in the year. 

Reflection

A window pane slicing the sky

into nine chunks of farm-fresh daylight

bouncing off your magenta wish

of a sunset, the glass framing

your wistful shore

reflecting what’s out there

all over what was.

All your beguiling brushstrokes

(beautiful seas, tangerine sands

throbbing core-lit clouds)

are competing with Today,

with a cut of spring, stamped

on the shiver of your loch –

another window on your world

made possible by a wall

and where you live.

http://www.spring-fling.co.uk/blog/2016/09/reflection-by-skye-loneragan/

Skye Loneragan is the 2016 Writer in Residence for Spring Fling and Wigtown Book Festival.

This two part residency involves Skye visiting studios throughout SF 2016 (28-30 May 2016), sharing poetry across distances with those on the Spring Fling studio tour & performing to those on the shuttle buses. Over the next couple of weeks we will be publishing some of Skye’s poems here on the blog on the lead up to WBF 2016. Skye will be performing her poetry at Wigtown Book Festival (23 Sept – 2 Oct 2016).