Christmas Day, Balmoral Beach
- Dougie
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
A poem for Christmas (sort of). Memory and diaspora. From PART 2: PLACE of Something That Comes Close, my debut published collection. Available to buy in paperback from Amazon Books, and as an eBook on Kindle, Kobo or Booktopia. Additional information at the bottom of this post.
Christmas Day, Balmoral Beach
I
I come from a cold climate: my point of origin, not far off the continental shelf but ten thousand miles from here, a tenth as far again to Reykjavik. A zone called temperate.
It shapes you. ‘Molds’ is way too soft a term for how it beats the souls of folk, sometimes less than temperate; hemmed-in by ice-cold North Sea water, rained upon incessantly, and blown to Hell and back by winds that herald winters from afar.
II
Huddling together, adjacent to the school bus stop, you turn your collar up, check the buttons on your duffle coat, adjust the jaggy balaclava knitted by your grannie. You rub your hands together through a pair of Santa’s Little Helper woolen gloves (likewise knitted by your mother’s mother from a pattern in The People’s Friend) and stamp your feet against the snow, like bison in a mid-west prairie storm. You watch your breath emerge before your eyes. A vaporous pillar. In another place and time, it could proclaim a Pope has been elected.
It’s half past eight but still the bus is nowhere to be seen. Your scarlet cheeks begin to sting. Your nose reminds your mates of Rudolph, hero of the quasi-carol we’ll be made to sing in music class (by Bible-belting Mrs. Jackson at her upright, brutalised piano) in a tortured corner of the draughty first floor of our almost arctic school.
And this, they’ll say, builds character.
III
An Aussie twang reclaims you for the beach on Christmas Day. An ancient classmate’s second cousin, once removed, calls out, inflection straining at the weight of his self-conscious irony. “Hey mate,” he says, “would yah throw another shrimp on that barbie?”
You lift the ‘eskie’ lid, move a ‘coupla-cold-ones’, and rummage through the thawing ice in search of tiger prawns within. But all you do is catch yourself: muttering the Rudolph song beneath your breath; wondering when it was you last saw snow at Christmas.
*****
Something That Comes Close is the debut work of Scottish-born writer Dougie Herd, now living in Australia. Reflections on becoming, on the joy of simple things, on life's hopeful journey. Sometimes sad because life sometimes is. But never despairing or despondent. Cos life's too short.
Pulse: memory, life and death, loss, dislocation.
Place: here and there, then and now, home and somewhere else.
Encounters: the unexpected.
Foolish Things: some of which are not entirely pointless.
Waving: the possibility of renewal, the necessity of change, the inevitability of silence.
Words by Dougie Herd. Illustrations by Spike Deane.
Buy your paperback copy at Amazon Books.
Available also on:
Comments