Document 1401
Broken sleep
Author(s): James Hiddo Moncrieff
Copyright holder(s): James Hiddo Moncrieff
Options:
Highlight word:
Text
On this grey granite city crag.
Only the sound of seagulls
Nesting - cliff-face sounds.
Ravens and seagulls flood
The rooftops and the early evening sky
With their acrobatic glide and twisting stall
And the shalder runs a noisy boundary
On the slopes of this Georgian
Gormengast.
I fly in like a homing pigeon
To roost within its walls.
Midnight and an old bull
Bellows his anguish down the hall.
A young woman rattles her cage
And mine - deaf on methadone.
All around me, heavy breathing
From the others trapped here.
Fire-flies flit the open spaces.
The monsoon arrives
With the tinkling of bells
And old age stares back
From the bed opposite.
A cricket perched on a tripod
Rubs its legs all night long
And the young worker bees
Toil like ants.
Daylight flies in on a predatory wing
To claim the empty space behind
Your curtain and the gap against the wall.
The drones are silent.
Breakfast arrives with the drawn curtains
The babble of new voices
And the day begins anew
As the telephone rings.
This work is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The SCOTS Project and the University of Glasgow do not necessarily endorse, support or recommend the views expressed in this document.
Cite this Document
APA Style:
Broken sleep. 2024. In The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 11 October 2024, from http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/document/?documentid=1401.
MLA Style:
"Broken sleep." The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2024. Web. 11 October 2024. http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/document/?documentid=1401.
Chicago Style
The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech, s.v., "Broken sleep," accessed 11 October 2024, http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/document/?documentid=1401.
If your style guide prefers a single bibliography entry for this resource, we recommend:
The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech. 2024. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk.