The Seagulls Crowd and Cry

What can you say? You say.

Your smile a fleeting rescue

For these last words,

Fragments of a shipwreck

Flotsam from ten long years

Lost to a wave’s welcome.

Hardly do I hear,

The high tide in my head

A squall of memories

That beats an unyielding cliff.

You say, I say, I loved you;

Tip-toeing through the wrack

Her smile reaches out a hand…

I refuse its gentle grasp

And on mad white horses

I cavalry charge the rocks.

On a sky’s clean canvas

Seagulls crowd and cry,

I hardly hear them,

A different kind of music

Playing through my mind

You set them, the mines,

To sink this our ship? You…

I step, gingerly I skate

Over the slippery rocks

Around these perilous pools

You did not see them!

I painted them. And you!

The screaming reds

I painted, the mad yellows,

Those sickly greens,

All my hysterical colours

For weeks and years

This insane rainbow,

A monument to my rain;

Heavy clouds, you are, 

My man, always overhead.

Never never do you look. 

Oh those beautiful bombs!

You’re insouciant, sailor.

These phrases float

On silver white sheets,

Waves upon waves

Printed up the beach

Their ghastly headlines

Your preacher’s wrath

It pins me to the pew:

You Poor Sinner! Sailor.

Hardly do I hear them,

Dancing to another song

I stumble along the shore

Scattering the lines 

Of this sand’s sermon.

You call me. Let’s go,

We must go now, you say.

Words like pebbles

Screeching at my feet,

The pain unbearable

Sculpts me to the spot

And I read these words

That do not keep still

Bursting like flak 

Their cymbals clash:

Christ! Listen! can’t you.

Plunging into a page

A rocket into water

Madness into sanity

Suddenly the waves still.

A lake’s quiet marble

Where memories sail

Silently out of the bay…

Goodbye. Now. I’m going.

Watching your words 

Vanish from the page

To leave a blank beach,

Our empty marriage bed,

I cry to the ebbing tide

Cling at the last sheet

And fall on the wet sand,

I do! I dribble. I do I do.