Irene Watson is a mid-career artist, poet and art teacher. She uses text and poetry within her work and this has been exhibited in pop-up community spaces in Scotland and exhibited in America and New Zealand. Irene has collated poetry anthologies written with adults with disabilities and has co-written touring plays. Recently, her poems have been published online and in anthologies. She is currently collating her first poetry pamphlet.
The Curlew
and I saw the curlew right there, on the plateau
on the day when raindrops were held
in mirrored cupulas.
Just there, you know, where the hill hollows out
and the scattered sheep winter over,
but I have never seen it again, never
and every day I drive along that single-track road, I stop
in the passing place, where we used to stop,
next to the harrowed fields,
where the lichen trees dwarf easterly
and a stillness picture frames the apex
amongst the steep crags, you know
where you can view the greying river
across to the clouded hills.
I wait and I look and I look again
but it is never there and now I am thinking
was it a trick of my mind?
Have I imagined that next to the blackened hedgerows
the other worldly beak, so elongated, so refined
curving for the earth, worm searching
is my memory confused, hypnotic?
And then, you said,
that it couldn’t be, that it wouldn’t be
it must have been something else
or even that I must have imagined it.
It was just before I saw that rose-pink balloon
in the middle of nowhere, floating
every day now, with less air, deflating slowly
and now it hovers on the top
of the lochan, in the lee of the hill
weathered, annulled even
and the pink reflection is its last blush, at dusk.
Irene Watson