11/12/2025
I found this (slightly damaged) photo of me as a child among our goats and thought it would go nicely with this poem of mine!
Published in From Glasgow to Saturn 2011
The Goat Shed
Corrugated iron painted rust red
slants to roof the low lean-to.
Inside, the dark is warm, straw-scented, goaty.
Make sure you bolt the door behind you,
tie the string; these clever beasts
would learn to get round anything in time.
If I was very still I could watch the milking;
my mum’s strong gentle hands squirting
milk hard into the frothy bucket.
She’d talk her quiet reassurance to Flora
or another, who watched me
from an uneasy gold-green sideways eye.
I knew I was no different from her.
I envied them their salt-lick,
I opened their feed-bin
and picked out malty chunks to chew.
My first experience of birth -
the restlessness, the mother’s fear
of the inevitable.
Her scared bray to push out
first an impossible little cloven hoof
then a sudden dark wet bag of kid.
My mother midwife knew instinctively
when to hold back, when to rush in.
The miracle baby ba-la-la on wobbly legs
pushing in for milk, then furiously wagging tail.
Goat mothers eat the afterbirth for energy.
My mum told Flora “Clever girl, well done.”
