Poem: Butter

This week’s Poet’s Corner contribution comes from Robbie Lennard in Adelaide.

Sep 13, 2023, updated Mar 18, 2025
A cottage said to date from the time of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Photo: Paulo62 / Wikimedia Commons
A cottage said to date from the time of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Photo: Paulo62 / Wikimedia Commons

Butter

Before Culloden

before a battle

buttered haggis tasted yummy

with a bowl of boiled potatoes

a cold hard crofter’s floor

a clod of clay

a kilt hanging on a hook

behind a Highlander’s open door

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a bag of pipes
neeps and tatties
a dram of whiskey (neat)
Tam O’Shanter and Robert the Bruce
Rabbie Burns brewing-up
a highland fling-like treat
a cross-sworded
crossly-worded jiggy-dance
with a highland fling-like beat

Bonnie Prince Charlie
on a bonnie boat

in a housemaid’s dress

speeding to an island
after a Jacobite’s defeat…

a pampered-prince
botching his last chance
scarpering-off via Skye
on his way
back to France.

Robbie Lennard, currently living in Adelaide, grew up in rural South Australia as a railway child and later graduated in science from Flinders University. He has written poetry since the age of 14, worked as a cleaner, labourer, at universities in geochemistry and radiochemistry, and as a weather person with the Bureau of Meteorology. He currently helps recent arrivals to Australia with settlement and English, loves clouds, light, and stars, and his writing is inspired by just about everything he experiences.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.