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My Love, the Shetland Trowie

After Rabelais.

His eyes are like extinguished lighthouses

His eyebrows are a gadderie of fiddlers

His nose a broken sea-arch

His jaw is like the blue ramp of the ferry lowering

                      then clanking shut

His mouth a hollow gloup

His teeth smashed Blue Vodka bottles

His saliva is like the seven tides of Shetland

His chest hair a scratchy kishie

His arms whirling wind turbines

His elbows are like crane-winches

His legs are posts bristling with barnacles

His buttocks are half-submerged skerries

His member is like the seal's head bobbing up

                       and down in the harbour

His bollocks are ponies' nose-bag

His pubic hair is the hay-nets flung 

                         over plastic rubbish bags

His arsehole is like the slippery steps down

                        to the lower deck

His urine is the swell in a Force 10 gale

His sweat is salty houb water

His oxters are like scories' nests

His nipples are the rings of salmon- traps

His navel is a fire-bucket peppered

                        with fag butts

His skin is like stiff, sea-drenched gaiters

His breath's  a blow-hole

His sigh the haar

His fart is like the flare at Sullom Voe

Stephanie Green


Glossary: trowie - a Shetland troll or goblin;  sixereen - a six-oared rowing boat; geo- a narrow chasm, often ending in  a cliff falling at right angles to a beach; gadderie - a gathering; voe - a sea-loch; kishie - woven straw basket used in pairs as panniers either side of a ponys back; gloup - a collapsed cave; skerries - rocks in the sea, submerged at certain times; houb - a salty loch; oxter - arm-pit; scorie - adolescent herring-gull; haar- a sea-mist; Sullom Voe - the oil refinery.

 Published in the author's pamphlet 'Flout' (HappenStance, 2015). 

Also published in the 'Mildly Erotic Verse' anthology (Emma Press, 2016.)

An earlier version was published in Northwords Now.