POEM OF THE DAY

Jen Hadfield, winner of the T S Eliot Prize in 2008, lives in Shetland, the setting for this poem. It was included in Best Scottish Poems 2017, an online publication of the Scottish Poetry Library, with 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year.

THE PLINKY-BOAT Something near to true night-darkness. The children are playing the Plinky-boat – a xylophone made from a reclaimed yoal – built for flexibility in a coarse sea, you can tell it fledged with ease, just blushed from boat to instrument, transpiring streams of these hoarse night-notes. For its copper pipes are cut to breadth exactly so the boat’s beam is its sotto voce and two rills of rising pitch run into stern and stem to the harmonic of each hinnyspot – the point the boards of gunwales and stem flow together.

I don’t know what it is about this place that things metaflower so readily into their present selves.

The instrument’s a boat, the notes unresonant and discs of thin light swarm over the pipes from the boys’ headtorches. Perhaps we heard seals broaching in the harbour as they answered the girls’ handclapping game –

I doubt they moaned in their haunted wise – here was everything – words lost, as I’m trying to say, their echo, that yodel into past and future.

The poem wouldn’t exist, but we couldn’t stay.

(from Sonnets Exchange: 2016-2017, British Council, 2017)