​UNSAFE DISCHARGE
 
A plain package, brown paper, string.
And a felt tip-pen to write your name.
As if you’d just come out of hospital or prison.
Are these your belongings
that you’re writing your name on?
Are you writing your name on the brown paper 
because the package contains your things?
 
      No. The package is what’s left 
      of what you thought was you.
 
And you’re standing, writing the name,
the real you, accepting the package,
putting your name on it.
 
Will you look after it? 
      The looking after’s done.
Will you open it? 
      No, it’s just a package at the end.
Will you keep it?
      Good question. There’s no need.
 
It represents the you you thought you were.
The you you had to go along with.
The you that you enjoyed.
The you that kept your hair appointments.
The you that learnt your times-table 
and sweated should the teacher point at you 
and name you for an answer, 
the you that developed superstitions 
about how to avoid attention. 
The you that remembers how to be invisible. 
 
The you that ran after possible futures, 
away from impossible ones, 
and neither amounted to much 
beyond that you, since what you needed 
always found that you;
 
The you that’s of your family.
That looks more like your grandmother 
than you know; the you of the gestures, 
the fleeting muscle memory that doesn’t flee,
how a rare smile flits through cousins and daughters,
like a wren in a thornbush. 
 
 

 BIRCH
 
You remembered 
that you had been wearing your white apron
while you had been working in the fields 
 
you saw men pass with their flag
riding to battle 
and you saw how the battle would happen at the beach 
 
where the waves rise and break
and you saw there was a light 
that you had never noticed before.
 
You, young then, 
ran home to the croft 
but your mouth couldn’t tell your mother 
 
and you lived a long life 
and you remember how much you were loved
even though you never spoke 
 
but papery words 
on a wounded tree bark glowing quietly, 
daughter.
 
 
Dawn Wood, No Trees to Whisper Project, 2020

​THE SILVER STAG
 
Like MacBeth, or a farce, four of us
In ‘real-tree’ jackets, caps down
deuking from hillock to hillock.
The deer winded us on a Westerly and bolted
 
Towards the next estate, hours since.
We scavenge golden plover host-whistles,
a sea-eagle spanning: I think ‘bath-spider’.
The wind catches the keeper’s… ‘looking forward…’
 
’50 in the hollow’ radios George, from Loch Con.
We’re on our stomachs. Ed and I lag,
make small talk. I ask his surname.
We study droplets. Long for gun shot. Sleet mists
 
The target. Finally the stag-thud. Mike’s first.
And how alive he looks. His long lashes.
His male smell. His mouthful of grass.
His portioned heart. Our four-fold need.
 
Dawn Wood 
from Quarry, Templar Poetry, 2008 

​You can see and hear this poem here. This was recorded when I was a lecturer at University of Abertay Dundee and filmed at McManus Galleries in Dundee, in 2010.
 

 
 
 

I WISH YOU A GOOD STORM
after Psalm 18
 
I wish you a good storm,
your hiding place, your safety net, 
your purpose lost.
 
I wish you a vast desert,
mesmerising in its nothingness,
just the one rock.
 
I wish you an uneven mountain – 
a weighing pallet
to take the weight of your heart.
 
I wish you a monstrous,
red-winged cherub,
your intercessor.
 
I wish you a name to call, a scream,
when death’s throat 
is at your throat;
 
that your furious knight
casts off his shining armour
sharpening lightning’s arrows –
 
flaming retribution –
makes scudding clouds pass over
your flimsy pavilion;
 
to be in front of what meets you,
I wish you torrents
to sweep you downstream –
 
your cry encompassed 
by the blast of the breath 
of the roar of your help –
 
your trembling is your sure foundation,
your storm, a good one;
heard in the heave and thrust of heaven,
 
soothed by quaking earth 
and seething fountains,
by sulphurous steam from furious nostrils,
 
tempered by geo-thermal waters 
coloured by writhing, primitive algae,
nurtured by hailstones and kindling brimstone –
 
your feet like hinds, 
your hands spread wide –
receive the miraculous bow of your arms.
 
Dawn Wood
From As Mind Imagines World, 2018, Templar Poetry
 ​

aleph
 
To put it another way, you’d been hoping to see the Northern Lights
and instead found yourself looking up at a pink grid in the sky
and there are groups of people seated at the piazza 
who also can see it; and, as you look up, sections of the grid are coming alight 
in flame and rose and yellow and gold 
 
you haven’t chosen this scene and the view from this perspective 
is more beautiful than you could ever have conceived, but
why is there no flickering green? you are asking –
then it comes to you, this is not about witnessing the Northern Lights, 
this is about watching the plots of our lives 
 
and making Ohs and Ahs as light plays through the sections
the wow! of what is up there, mirrored by our wow! rippling below. 
And you think, too, it must be the same for the earth, and the stars,
the cone of light of their lives engrossed in all that is.
This is the first letter of the alphabet.

Dawn Wood, 2020

​

THE PULLEY
 
Strength would be to bend,
to choose to be within the presence 
of low cloud; a quiet day, no wind 
to lend its energy to waves;
to swim in little colour but the haar, 
to let the kind horizon, the companionship
you somehow conjured drift,
the kick of everything you left 
before the stilling of the gifts; 
to bear the absence, so to stand, 
to stay the tension on the cord,
to let the undercurrent lift.
 

​Dawn Wood, 2020