POEM TITLE
Blackness On Sea
POEM
This salt air, beach hair, oyster shell crunch,
wind-swept hem of obsidian ocean,
christened by poets,
blessed by saints,
lived and loved by those neither lyrical nor holy,
but worthy.
Reel its ale-black waters into the body’s blood,
Pry mollusks from the rocky crags
and swallow whole
the shell-cased sea.
Taste times Roman
and before.
breathe those vaporous days yet lived
in Blackness-On-Sea’s shore.
Here fishers weigh their netted catch in losses.
The dubh sea scale impossible to balance.
True love and lives discounted
under the cheating thumbs of the gods.
With Blackness comes the bright,
the light-headed, too,
Braggarts brag with pints in hand,
the humbles sip away.
Friends lively joke while aiming darts
precisely at the others’ hearts, or
failing that,
prick pinholes in their scute.
Galoot and tourist come Black way
gawking film sets,
climbing trees long since felled.
The Yanks have never much to say
except for everything.
And families, oh the families,
their familiar ties and lies
the who was who
the what was what
and when the how was why.
They built the village stone by stone
Spilt blood and tears and laughter.
Dug coal from earth,
made salt from Firth
stashed centuries of seconds
in a castle by the sea.
There was laughter, always laughter,
and happy wee ones’ playing.
Wag-tail dogs and purring cats,
the bossy barking seals.
Then ghosts of cuddies, badly worked,
haunt-clopped the pebbled coast.
Here too live those Blackness ships
that failed to launch or sail
the babies lost
the women snuffed
the brain-caged broken soldiers.
The rattled shattered restless
and those heather-bedded sleepers
who frittered days or dreamed too small
as if our only here-and-now
were no more urgent
than The Lobster Pot’s last call.
The good, the bad and miserable,
marked years in sacred ritual.
Kirk vows, birth rites and final pipes
to play the souls to ethers.
Each stardust vessel left at sea
or buried on the moor
no less dazzling
for its brevity
in Blackness-on-Sea shore.