WAVES

In the breeze you breathe their stare,
travelling ribs of silence in the sunlight,
in their lull you sense the segments
of the faces you have met, defaced now
gently in the glare, clustering in their transit;
you hear willingness in their throats and irises,
their accents absorbed in the streaming on shore,
in the quiet strength lapping the rocks;
their lips will follow you, you’ll sleep in their ripples,
your skin swarming in the sand of the bottom
one with the flowing hush and the blossoming above.


This poem is here for celebrating ( and "talking with") the excellent sea poem Waymarks by Mavis Gulliver published in one of Juliet Wilson's blogs "Bolts of Silk". The atmosphere of Waymarks reminded me of the years in which I wrote "Waves" and many other sea poems or water's edge poems. A great time, I had only to go to the beach for a walk and a poem popped up on the way back home.

LIGHT CONTRAST

There's a man up there
working on my roof in the blue,
while I am here in the dark, in my armchair,
possessed by the flu.

NIGHT IN THE GARDEN

It’s night at last, all frames almost blurred
and no more hardened by light, no more
pitilessly evident.
I am sitting in the rocking chair in the garden,
all lights switched off, the earth letting
its cooler breath mellow the silence.
Now thoughts can glide and pretend nonchalance,
sliding on the skin of the dark,
I hear cars whooshing on the road behind,
fast swarms, the persistence of the present,
the asphalt so smooth in its familiar grey,
looking always so keen on taking a plunge
to bridge any gap on the way.
I am breathing now the darker dark
of my garden’s tall trees,
shadows like seas,
that tell you “swim and space, swim and pass”,
in the persistence of absence
which darkness makes
just a little bit more bearable.
Let me stay then
enveloped in this dark,
in it I can still endure in my aching
and please let dawn be long, long in the making.