STEPHANIE GREEN‘s pamphlet ‘Flout’ was published by HappenStance, and launched at StAnza, 2015.  ‘Berlin Umbrella’ an ‘aural walk’  poetry/sound  collaboration with Sound Artiste, Sonja Heyer, will launch in Berlin in summer, 2018.  She lives in Edinburgh and is a Dance and Theatre reviewer.

All 3 poems are about the way of life of the St Kildans and the issues which led to their asking the British Government to evacuate them in 1930. https://sites.google.com/site/stephgreen1/ 

Marriage Test

Pinions push through my finger-tips.
I balance with arms outstretched.

When I inch along the lip of the Marriage Stone,
hanging above a 250 foot drop

white crests are feathers in the blue.
Breaking waves silent on the rocks.

As the wind coories under my wings,
I lean with fulmars on thermals,

understand the language of soar and glide,
the colour of solitude.

You cannot tear a Hammond Organ into 16 parts

(On rejected wedding gifts from the people of Sunderland who invited themselves, arriving by steamer, to attend the marriage of 23 year old Annie Ferguson to cragsman Neil Gillies, St Kilda, 1890.)

A London fashion gown for a wedding dress
A heap of pork pies
Silver spoons
Jars of Bovril
Feeding bottles
Bottles of digestive syrup
Some old books
A tangle of assorted spectacles
A large Hammond organ

Dream of the Feather House

(After the evacuation of St Kilda and Resettlement in Morvern, 1930)

Treeless, we never imagined living wood
was different from stiff and silvered driftwood,
storm gifts too precious to burn.

When we first arrive, the moors are bare.
Sitka spruce are green stars which prick
the men’s fingers as they plant the seedlings in rows.

Trunks thicken, skin cracks purple,
weeps resin. Overnight our house is dwarfed
by bristling dark; sky shrinks to holes.

No uproar of gannets, no blue
skimmed with flight; no fulmar’s spit;
no puffin’s grin and flap.

Here our neighbours are twitching red deer,
a watching fox. A flash of brown bursts
with song: a wren. Finally a sound of home.

Last night the wind shook the house, tore
through the trees, roaring like surf on the strand,
feathery scuds floating over the rocks.

I dreamt of plucking gannets and fulmars, armfuls
of clouds in the Feather House, laughing until I choked
not on feathers but needles stuck in my throat.

All works published by the Glasgow Review of Books are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and the journal reserves the right to be named as place of first publication in any citation. Copyright remains with the poet. http://www.glasgowreviewofbooks.com