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Morag Smith
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the poet
Morag Smith's work has featured in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems of 2023, Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg Magazine, The Scotsman, Gutter and Ink, Sweat and Tears. Winner of the Paisley Book Festival's 2021 Janet Coats Memorial Prize, Morag has also been highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize, and shortlisted twice for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her debut pamphlet, Background Noises, examines the re-wilding and human history of the partly abandoned Dykebar Hospital. She's currently working on a pamphlet of visual poetry about semi-derelict hospital buildings, due out in 2026, with her first full collection set to appear in 2027.
the poems
Bog
Her lessons are ankle deep at the edge, tannic brown spilling
over my shoes she sprawls patient in her hive of lost things,
poisoned monarch of sedge and rush always knowing
her place in the world the air above her thick with pollen
microscopic debris remnants of murmurations
that settle like nets on hedgerow rise and fall again with the exhalation
of millennia scant summer whitethroats search for crane flies
in the shift and flow of permanence find instead blister packs molars sharp moraines
of mouse bones a barbed wire torque gleams on the bank ready for the flood plains
where Cala Bellway Persimmon wait with their diggers unable
to let things be the plash of her whispers tells me I am also a queen
of sedimented clay the more I twist the more I sink
a quilt of benzodiazepine wraps and transmutes anger breath memory
to ancient carbon spores of Mesozoic ferns drifting to the Day Room
it would be best not to build here
Background Noises
1. Extraneous sound which can be heard while listening to
or monitoring something else;
2. A person or thing considered to be irrelevant or incidental
Every breath thick with mycelium and brick dust, ornate fences rusted down. Hollow knocking on a smeared window, jumble of prosthetic limbs, tangled with the rustling chokehold of ivy’s betrayal. We propose removal from the greenbelt. Whump, whump of trees falling. Hawthorn and Sycamore thrash through the night’s storms, gone by morning. Removal vans, engines running, porters calling, matches struck, smoke exhaled, sound of a wren, like a fire alarm. Pine cones skitter dry on tarmac, shouts of wind-swung signs DANGER ASBESTOS NO ENTRY, copper coins nestle deep in oak burrs. Buildings shift shoulders, moan to scratch, flap, groan of rafters heavy with crow. From the new block, consultants’ cars purr, locks buzz, monitors beep; the sound of a wren, though rare, is occasionally heard. What the old asylum says is unreliable; scratched letters, doctors’ notes on yellow paper in manilla folders, closed archive shelves. Commendations in the Paisley Gazette describe palatial dwelling houses for lucky staff and patients, where a nurse sobs for her lost fiancé and a joiner cries for his mother while a young lieutenant learns to walk with a crutch, spends his afternoons flicking through collected works of Shakespeare; pages whir through fingers, The isle is full of noises … Concert parties sing of rowan trees that creak and stretch into sun-quiet summer, bees on cabbage flowers, lunchtime bells and dinner gongs; sound of a wren, tic, tic, trill.
Two Storms
The Glasgow Hurricane
Once in 1968, our neighbourhood
made the news when December gales
peeled a tenement gable end. We gathered
to gape at doll’s house rooms, furnished with
G-plan sideboards, cocktail cabinets,
suicidal mattresses, teetering.
I remember the cracked eyes of
television sets gazing down,
my voice asking Where are the people?
That year at Christmas I got a bungalow
with detachable roof, fold down walls,
and the Newtown Home Set – parents
with teenage daughter and monozygotic twins.
Their jointed limbs let them sit for dinner.
There was a rocking horse, badged school blazers,
savings in the bank, unwrinkled
plastic smiles of vigilance, always ready
for sudden hands descending through the ceiling
or random soldiers at the breakfast table.
They knew one day the cataclysm would come,
so tumbled uncomplaining into their graves
at the council tip. Now, in my sleep,
the whole family floats in the South Pacific
Garbage Patch, though recently they've been
swimming back to me like old friends.
Arms and legs pump furiously
I cry out loud, You haven’t aged a bit!
Ciara, 2020
The Bridge Guest House is peeled
open, walls still hung with summer landscapes.
They gave the tempest its chosen name
and showed on TV the bedroom doors
still hung above a landscape filled
with floating debris of two hundred years.
My bedroom doors are closed tight against
winds and rivers, too strong, too high,
the swells that excavate my sleep
and peeled the Bridge Guest House. They are
brutal and constant as old friends.
Now we give them names.
In spring 2020, half of the 200 year old Bridge Guest House in Hawick was washed into the River Teviot by a storm.
Publishing credits
Bog / Background Noises: Background Noises (Red Squirrel Press)
Two Storms: exclusive first publication by iamb