Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Owned by Gulls
A recording of my poetry reading at Longstone Heritage Centre, St Mary's, Isles of Scilly, 17th August, 2006. Unfortunately this is incomplete because Flickr has a ninety-second rule for videos!
This one is a bit more sophisticated: I have added a series of pictures of the island of Samson.
Owned by Gulls
Bar Point at low tide. The beach a white hump,
With a single line of weed. Dune grass blued by brine.
On Dune Hill, a string of cairns from the days of Ennor.
Yellow furze, dormant ling, a line of opened tombs.
The petering path, punctuated by thrushes’ anvils
With their own snailshell cairns, and always,
The wind-flayed sternums of gulls, rock-pipits
And once-fearless wrens, the bleached wings still attached.
Down the hill, towards the spume-worn Neck.
Enter this empty, roofless home to your right,
Stoop beneath the rafter that would have been.
Silence, uncanny, unfathomable. Listen
For the wheeze of a Woodcock, clay pipe
Clenched in stained incisors. The air is thick;
It is hard to breathe. Emptiness, like the orbs
Of a gull’s skull.
Then up the slope towards South Hill,
Another house beckons you, the hard-hewn lintel
Perched, precarious as a bird, the low hearth
Lichen-bearded. The same silence, the same thickness,
The same constriction of the throat. You know
That you are breathing ghosts, not air. The half-heard sigh
Of a Webber, worn from kilp-burning, aching
To rest her legs beside the fire that would have been.
And back out into the vacancies of brown bracken,
Along this improbable deer-park wall, by these bluebells,
Half-open, grown wild from some garden long gone.
Owned by gulls, and the ghosts of all that would have been.
Source material: Inspired by a walk on Samson, 9th April 2004. Samson was most recently inhabited by humans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, by two families, the Woodcocks and the Webbers, who made a meagre living from kilp (seaweed burned to produce raw ingredients for glassmaking), and whose houses still exist in the form of gaunt granite ruins. The last inhabitants of Samson were forcibly evicted by one Augustus Smith, whose grandiose plan to establish a deer-park on the island was thwarted by the deer themselves, who recklessly tried to swim back to Tresco. In prehistoric times, when the cairns were built, the Isles of Scilly were all one land-mass - a fact attested by the ancient field-systems which continue onto the beaches and into the sea - romantically known as Ennor. Samson comprises two unequal hills, divided by a “Neck”, low to the water. The island is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of the large numbers of nesting seabirds which occupy the cliffs of South Hill in the breeding season. It is to be hoped, though any ornithologist would question the accuracy of the word, that Samson will now remain “uninhabited” forever. Poem by Giles Watson.
Owned by Gulls
A recording of my poetry reading at Longstone Heritage Centre, St Mary's, Isles of Scilly, 17th August, 2006. Unfortunately this is incomplete because Flickr has a ninety-second rule for videos!
This one is a bit more sophisticated: I have added a series of pictures of the island of Samson.
Owned by Gulls
Bar Point at low tide. The beach a white hump,
With a single line of weed. Dune grass blued by brine.
On Dune Hill, a string of cairns from the days of Ennor.
Yellow furze, dormant ling, a line of opened tombs.
The petering path, punctuated by thrushes’ anvils
With their own snailshell cairns, and always,
The wind-flayed sternums of gulls, rock-pipits
And once-fearless wrens, the bleached wings still attached.
Down the hill, towards the spume-worn Neck.
Enter this empty, roofless home to your right,
Stoop beneath the rafter that would have been.
Silence, uncanny, unfathomable. Listen
For the wheeze of a Woodcock, clay pipe
Clenched in stained incisors. The air is thick;
It is hard to breathe. Emptiness, like the orbs
Of a gull’s skull.
Then up the slope towards South Hill,
Another house beckons you, the hard-hewn lintel
Perched, precarious as a bird, the low hearth
Lichen-bearded. The same silence, the same thickness,
The same constriction of the throat. You know
That you are breathing ghosts, not air. The half-heard sigh
Of a Webber, worn from kilp-burning, aching
To rest her legs beside the fire that would have been.
And back out into the vacancies of brown bracken,
Along this improbable deer-park wall, by these bluebells,
Half-open, grown wild from some garden long gone.
Owned by gulls, and the ghosts of all that would have been.
Source material: Inspired by a walk on Samson, 9th April 2004. Samson was most recently inhabited by humans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, by two families, the Woodcocks and the Webbers, who made a meagre living from kilp (seaweed burned to produce raw ingredients for glassmaking), and whose houses still exist in the form of gaunt granite ruins. The last inhabitants of Samson were forcibly evicted by one Augustus Smith, whose grandiose plan to establish a deer-park on the island was thwarted by the deer themselves, who recklessly tried to swim back to Tresco. In prehistoric times, when the cairns were built, the Isles of Scilly were all one land-mass - a fact attested by the ancient field-systems which continue onto the beaches and into the sea - romantically known as Ennor. Samson comprises two unequal hills, divided by a “Neck”, low to the water. The island is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of the large numbers of nesting seabirds which occupy the cliffs of South Hill in the breeding season. It is to be hoped, though any ornithologist would question the accuracy of the word, that Samson will now remain “uninhabited” forever. Poem by Giles Watson.