Continuing the archive

Anthology entry selected by Hilary Mellon, 2005


Curlew Cry

The cry of the curlew, where
sea rises faster than a man can walk.
Fog laps the damp, the suck
of salt-fattened mud
on boots and dogs and sea birds.

Dogs seem to surf the marsh,
while men walk their
leaden-footed oily gait in mud
that will embalm them to leather.
Mud swallows men whole.

Wrecked boats settle with
the lowering tides as the wind
clanks through the masts; plovers
whistle from the beds of thrift.
This is the time for skeletons of ships
and bones of men to wash up.


Anthology selection by George Szirtes, 2006


Porthmeor

From our gull-harassed house
we can almost see Newfoundland.
Across the whole half-globe
of ice-green Atlantic, whales
nose the deep soundings.

Your sonar, quick dull thuds,
echoes across the depths.
You are as unknown and unseen
as the frosted wastes of the Arctic,
as the North Atlantic Drift

and yet we search horizons
through sea mist and spray.
Nightly, your eddies swirl,
mercury-thick against the
granite full stop of the cliffs.


Anthology selection by Doris Corti, 2008

Harvest Moon

A ship slices the sea from the horizon,
cleanly. This pebble-clacking foreshore
sings in ochres, umbers, straw-wet
sloughed-off layers as dusk falls.

Blackbirds throw their vibratos from
branch to roof and back again
as sky deepens to blood-red over
the sandspit land and cracked wooden hulls.

A salt smell is everywhere. Dew falls
on skin. Silence, then the ripe moon
is neon-bright and low-slung in
the ink-bled, early frosted night.

Anthology selection by Keith Chandler, 2009

Seals

Out there, where the sea trembles like mercury
under the cooling violet of the dusk sky,
seals raise their boulder-shiny heads
and doggy-paddle, cutting a thin wake
through the smooth water.

On the clacking hillock of flints
our unsure feet meet the body of a seal,
eyeless, where the gulls have been at him.
Fur salt-thickened and stuck in stiff folds.
Leathery hands clasp the pebbles.

Near him is the perfect skeleton of a fish;
the memory of the chase, and now
the sea wants him back. Next high tide
he will be keel-hauled with fish; picked clean.
Sleek silhouette rolled to coral.