Author Archives: colinhopkirk

In dappled light beneath the Linden Hans Biebow the Mayor circling his temples tries to still his thoughts Thoughts that want to fly They ask too much Perhaps they are insane How can he hold ten thousand sparrows?

Junior Blackwood was not like all the others who were more like children who needed guidance sometimes encouragement sometimes a firm hand who when the time came had let the colony go to hell You wouldn’t recognise the farm who walked right in as soon as we had gone as if it was nothing asContinue reading “Hashim Bin Abdullah”

mid-seventies perhaps navy blue cap with Tiger Beer in gold tan leather document bag slung across his shoulder enters the public bar is welcomed by the barman orders half a cider with ice and settles at the next table I’ve seen him before We are on nodding terms From the leather bag he pulls aContinue reading “The man in the yellow windcheater”

around a blind bend on a narrow mountain road a local teen on a child’s motorcycle topless helmet-less tab-end in his gob sporting an almost moustache (think threadbare Errol Flynn) doesn’t miss a beat jinks around us and is gone beyond a cloud of dust trailing blue smoke

The Police car came and took away the boy next door the youngest who is in his early twenties who loses it some days who yells at his mother whose father left months ago who yells in English not in Arabic who argues with himself who wears circles in the lawn who would rather notContinue reading “The boy who”

I bought a loaf of bread a Peter Nairn white blomer ‘Best bread from Scotland Wrapped the old fashioned way!’ I used it to make toast spread with lots of butter and thick-cut marmalade by Keiller of Dundee It tasted heavenly Nothing tastes that good It must have been a dream ******************** I googled -noContinue reading “Peter Nairn”

laden with green fruit a headless pigeon the rot setting in Possibly a fox probably our cat stealthy or just plain lucky the pigeon drunk on grain dreaming its head off

Clattering through branches old heron makes another crappy landing

Do they dream of Hudson Bay of long migrations of vastness of mountain air of howls that carry far enough to proclaim its us and we are here and all of this is ours this lake, these slopes, these trees as far as you can see as far as we can run?

I was sat half-listening to something somebody was saying when time slowed just long enough for me to understand that the blue-grey blur high and to my right was a juvenile rocket bird testing its engines