IAN SCOTT MASSIE: PAINTER AND PRINTMAKER
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Poetry: Moments

Poetry about Moments by Ian Scott Massie

Curlews

Wind of cloudscape and seaspray
Scours, roars, glides and soars between the evening hills.
Kissing the fan of falling water,
Rattling the rusted shells of leaves on limestone,
Hissing in a tide of trees
And lifting the magic bird.

The stone coloured camouflaged curlew - 
Curving beak and curving song - 
Swings like a dark lantern on the unseen slopes of sky
And pours its liquid flight
Down to the nest of night.

May

Screamed by swifts and rung by river song,
Glittered by shaking leaves and scalloped by peewits,
Chanted by doves and burnished by blackbirds,
The month lifts its tumbled head into the sky.

Hawthorn hedges creak with swollen knuckles,
Wrestling roots through walls,
And, weary under the weight of grass,
The stream plunges and rumbles in the darkness,
While down the dale the air flows like plover’s wine
Around the early dancing larks.

In sunshine crackled with bees and broken promises of grouse
The viper pours between the heather’s bones
And lies exhausted on the slowworm warming stones.

The cloud-vaulted sky rings with shaken bells of bird song,
With a loveliness unknown to those who
Trudge from a sunday shroud of sleep
To clanging churches
Hung with the pale ghost they call joy.

The First Swallow Of Spring

Above the hard shining road
Hot with the glare of raw sunlight
I looked between the trees at the stillness of the sky.

Above the beech bark smooth as a glazier’s thumb,
Above the maples cracked and peeling like old plaster,
Above fields that flow green waves between dry stone piers,
Above the surf surging wind and new born leaves
I saw him.

Fresh from Africa, wings black as blue tempered steel,
He rolled, soared, curled, corkscrewed 
And glided over the cowslipped turf
And flickered his wing tips,
And was gone.

I waited through the lapwinged, curlewed, goldfinched hours
Until the stretching of the shadows and the falling of a star,
And, walking from the dimness cast by the old house,
I saw him on a wire scratched across the sky,
Folded and furled like a feathered flag of joy,
The summer bird.

Spring Sunday

Through the mist the sun sifts light
Against the silver fin of hill.

Cutting the limestone land in ribbons,
Pleating the daisy dusted pastures,
The shadows form and fade.

They never told me this was here
As I lumbered through geography and maths.

On the economics paper no words said
It doesn’t have to be like this.

When they measured me for my working clothes
And showed me how to punch my card
No-one lifted their voice above the clatter of machinery,
Or pointed over the roofs behind the railway,
Or waved their hand at the distances
Beyond the gas works and the canal
And the smoke-plumed chimneys and said
There is another way.

God, the arrogance of cities and the lies they spawn.
And now I stand here
A free man.

Perhaps one day I shall have another halfpenny
To rub together with this one.
Perhaps not.
It really doesn’t matter either way.

On The Road

On the road is exactly how it feels.
Its not about dishwashers and the next expensive thing.
Its about where I’ve travelled from,
Where I’m going and who travels with me.

Whether they are around me or away from me
Or in my soul
We are all travelling.

What is important is the journey
And how it is great
And how it hurts,
How it feels to hold my children
And how it feels 
When I can’t call my Mum
On the first Mothering Sunday morning
That she is not in this world anymore.

But I know that we are still travelling
Still on the road
Together.

Last Journey Of The Year

It is winter
And the thread of road over Pott Moor
Is dusted white
With the threat of January.

The wind has muscles here
That can tread life into a shallow grave
Without even trying.

Perhaps we won’t pass this way again
Until April relaxes the madman’s grip
On his axe of ice.

And standing in St. Chad’s tiny church
On its hill at the dalehead
It seems that we inhabit islands
In the archipelago of the Pennines
Whenever the snow falls.

Looking Down

The tiny plane propellered through the summer sky,
Slow as a grey goose against the western wind.

Penhill was a rising whale in a misty sea
Beyond the mindless isle of Catterick Camp,
And fragrant slabs of moor 
Lay spread like tea loaf
On a platter of Yorkshire green.

As miles that have left my booted feet steaming
Poured beneath the metal mayfly,
Monastic tracks and trods
Spokewheeled away below the banking wings,
And dale merged into dale
Fudged by fingers of wind on peat.

We turned by Greenhow for Harper Hill,
Sun spilling through the scattered cloud
And, passing over home,
Swept down the tail wind to the landing lights.

The hour of unreality 
Was lifted from me,
The bubble dissolved,
And I could taste the wind once more.

The October Road

You took my hand
Like the flame of Christmas past
And stung me with a spark of love.
For you I turned my eyes to the sun
And burned out all my yesterdays.

And but for you
I would have laid in the wind
Where the clouds sweep from Nidderdale to Yoredale
And let my sorrow for myself win.

That is all finished with now
And I can paint today as bright as I like,
Since you took my hand
Like the flame of Christmas past
And stung me with a spark of love.

Marmion Tower

We came here, my children and I,
A long time ago on an overcast day.

They stood at the oriel window and smiled.
The camera said: Click!
I still have the photograph.

I had a big yellow dog, which I don’t have now,
Hair, which I don’t have now,
And a wife which I don’t have now.

After seven years we came back again,
But this time the sun shone on the honey stones.

My children stood at the oriel window and smiled.
The camera said: Click!
(Again.)

I miss my dog.


And I miss my hair.

Piercebridge

When Andrew and Heather were married
The summer day shone like a polished harmonica,
And, after the wedding breakfast,
Served on salvers of speeches,
We floated over the manicured lawns 
And,
Temporarily moored by the gilded fishes
In their reeded world,
Decided to leave the langouring crowd
For a walk in the late English afterlunch.

A drive between dusty hedges spokewheeling away
Between ochre corn and sienna stubble
And we came to the Roman bridge.

I clambered cutwater, causeway and crumbled tumbled stones
While you alighted as a crimson flame on emerald grass.
I turned, few words unfurling,
And fell enchanted by
The spill of your hair,
The fall of your dress,
The lovliness of you.

It was forever a perfect day.

Sometimes This Is Our Room

Sometimes this is our room
On summer’s tail or spring’s beginning
When
Tired from running our world
We arrive in search of sanctuary.

Sometimes this is our bed of new born dreams
On autumn’s wings or winter’s memory
When
Fresh from turning the pages
We celebrate the chapter’s close.

Sometimes this is our space of morning light
On days as fresh as a lamb’s first breath
When
Miraculously drawn from the water’s depths
We step out into the new days of our love.

Ian scott massie


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  • Home
  • Art
    • Paintings and Prints
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    • Contact
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    • Previous Exhibitions
    • Biography
  • Books etc.
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  • Dreams in Stone