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Best Poems Written by John Mcgillivray

Below are the all-time best John Mcgillivray poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | John Mcgillivray Poem

Digestive Dunking

It’s time for tea and dunking

A crisp Digestive biscuit

But before immersion into the hot beverage

And to aid entry into my mug

I snap the biscuit in half

The contours of my broken biscuit

Remind me of a Norwegian coastline

With their fiords , coves , peninsulas and inlets

I wonder whether the snapped shape is unique

Or whether another dunker has ever

Snapped or will ever snap the exact same shape

A shape that would mate exactly with one half of mine

To form the perfect Digestive circle

With no hint of forced togetherness

I surmise that given sufficient dunkings

Over untold millennia and myriads of time

By the laws of probability

There must have been or will be a perfect mate

In the same way surely

That enough explosions in a printing factory

Could produce the complete works of Shakespeare

Or the union of two gene pools could produce an identical twin

From different parents

Great thoughts and musings

Are prompted during dunkings

But now it is time to savour

My soft and warm Digestive fragment

Which I must ingest quickly

Before it becomes too tea –sodden and structurally unstable

With the ever present risk of disintegration

Breaking off and sinking to the bottom of my mug

Such important ponderings must therefore cease

Details | John Mcgillivray Poem

By the River

The frenzied city far away 
Abandoned for a calmer day 

Now relish Devon’s autumn hues  
That gild the trees and tint the views 

Blissful hours beside the river 
A sudden gust; the branches quiver 

A seedpod falls to float downstream
Borne by the water keen and clean

Perhaps to reach a distant sea
Via wooded banks and verdant lee

But soon to meet its voyage’s end
As stranded at the river’s bend 

There to set its tender roots 
At springtime force its own green shoots 

And so its destiny, not sea
But to become a towering tree

To flourish where the river flows
And shed in turn its embryos 

That spiral downwards to the flow
Along the current fast and slow 

Ever reaching for the sky 
As seasons of the year pass by 

Thriving  on the river’s bank
With others of its sylvan rank     


The  spreading  canopy now shades
The springtime flowers in woodland glades 

Thus Nature’s cycle is assured 
And river gazers never bored