Alistair Paterson

Alistair Paterson is a Scottish poet and creativity coach/trainer living and working in Ayr, Scotland.  His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies in the UK and continental Europe. He is the author of Quadrivium: Poems from Four Paths, and has collaborated on several artist book projects with French artists including Bertrand Bracaval and Robert Pillard-Valere.

Cumulonimbus Incus

anvil in the sky

and I resist Norse metaphor

symbology

mythology

loaded stories 

that take you as far away

as close to the things they represent

to indulge the formation

the meteorology

in all its glory

and associate it 

to nothing

and all the while 

through the pondering

there is the wonder of a storm in the making ...

The Bones Know

tide turns flooding The Rough Firth

sandbanks disappear 

then the saltflats

and boats float off the seabed

precision effect from exact causes

Earth and moon synchronised 

true to the entry in the Solway Tide Timetable

and with the tiny tilts now in Earth’s axis – 

realignments altering weather and other phenomena – 

changes we see and feel

what of solar and galactic?

what changes wrought by butterfly wings

flapped here on the far out there

where we don’t see and don’t know what it is 

that we at the same time feel in our bones –

and where we feel it to their marrow –

for they’re spun in cosmic dance 

aligning countlessly at all times with every thing 

as they turn on their bodies’ locomotion 

and Earth spins?

ask the bones

what do they say?

listen to the bones

the bones know

The Promise of Poetry

(A poem should not mean, but be.  Archibald McLeish)

after Rilke (1875-1926)

the question of the poet’s work is asked again – 

Tell me poet, what do you do?

poetry should be made to breathe

and do so through the power of the aspirant pen

poetry should open because it has been turned over by the ink of the delving pen

poetry should song a voice on the paper of its page and upon the tongue of its sayer

poetry will wear out all that does not fit it.