Poem No. 126

POEM TITLE Blackness Bay (A villanelle for Catherine)

POEM

If I could give you just another day,

We would spend it somewhere that we both know

Where time is always still – in Blackness Bay.

Briny hands and soft salty cheeks would play –

Wet white horses with fizzing manes below –

If I could give you just another day.

A thousand hearts sing on sticky sea spray –

Kings and working men, poets, and all those

Others who rest in time in Blackness Bay.

In The Lobster Pot we would dine and say

Auld Lang Syne. In Blackness on Sea, drinks flow

And we laugh, just like any other day.

Outside, a ship that never sailed, they say,

Is an earthly ode to those other folk

Whose time is always still, in Blackness Bay.

Above a foaming froth of stormy grey

I breathe, and give breath to a thousand souls.

While I cannot give you another day,

Our time is always here in Blackness Bay.