Saturday 23 March 2013

The North Sea

We’re in Aldeburgh in Suffolk. We are having an unfeasibly long winter, snow at the end of March. I went for a run in the painful cold. My body, my crow food carcass helped me write a poem when I got back. A couple of photos from the relative warmth of our apartment window follow.

Gulls and terns

take turns

to shriek and giggle

the sullen crows

watching, will he fall?

red in the grey of the storm

carrion, he’s carrion, meat

they whisper,

shadows gathered in the shingle pits

safe from the ice daggers

charging over the battered bluff

the empty head of a fish

already finished, rolling away.

Run, keep running

one side’s done, numb

turn around, let the sea

bite your other side

flaying symmetry.

Think, old Northmen

their dragon boats.

Today is safe, they’re

clustered in fjord harbours

but their howling ghosts

rail impotent

with the wind

barging at the closing door

© Poem and Photos. Mel Melis, March 23rd 2013

Followers