Poet’s Corner: Jonah on the Shore
Read more from last week’s featured poet. His poems Jonah and In the Shower are also online.
There is no easy way to say it:
There is fish vomit in my ears,
There is salt in my eyes
And scarcely a pinch of memory
to flavour the whole thing
with that luxury ‘reality’.
I am pebble smooth, yet my
conscience is ragged I am
seaweed swaddled and all I
have on my mind: my
flotsam form wrecked
in one long gargle of froth, and
Should my arm bend this way?
I think not, I
fear the seagulls are wiser
than me in thinking I’m dead,
And the dawn staggers blearily
up from the shingle
as if it had forgotten,
what it was meant to be doing,
So greyness then, and a
single cloud that composes itself
in a way that I cannot tell
is just bad luck or a bad joke, it
Crowns the sky and I kick a rock, think
‘God-’ it
breaks down into turrets and I curse
as a crab begins to gnaw my scalp…
Give me time. This dawn could last
aeons, and the whole worlds mouth
swills with grey. I light a fire from kelp
and laugh. So far, this is
my favourite miracle.
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