Po-em work - present, memory, dream
Lighthouse Keeper - 12/09/2025
Its summertime, grass grown long With frenetic bursts of rain erupting through sparse sunshine When sun comes Her rays give fleece-warmth and Her light startles with torch-brightness and I’m walking up a hill, boots embedding In verdant tufts, dun soil, pale chalk Dizzying drop of cliff behind me Seducing the grey-blue horizon In white, square-patterned dress – a geologist would tell me These are sections of erosion. The scrub lessens I crest another hill; foliage and wildflowers smudging Into gold-green brushstrokes – a watercolour Amid sea-mist sluicing inland As smugglers once crept towards shipwrecks Cargo shucked from wooden carcasses Gritty insides becoming pearls For the daring, the desperate, the damned I remember you laying your arm along mine White coastal curve and the soil Or driftwood of my limb – not bleached by sun; burdened With the darkness of bogs and muddy forest trails – A dun wooden ship clashing against your pale cliff-edge Perhaps, I was too eager to barter treasures Words stolen in fog Perhaps, I needed the silver tongue Found nestled in the maw of a drowned naval officer By the ragged youth who started smuggling When she snagged a crate of lemons, cuddling The shore and sold them for a pound – Him – taking off your dress Like in that song - I’m walking away from your flat Not knowing where. Just away Too-early or too-late – Its summertime, yet the grass is shorn Of all growth and colour When I first dreamt about you I couldn’t imagine Kissing you – I’d wake with awe and anxiety Aroused yet unsure of my feelings Or if fantasies should become What they did when I thought about you. I’m asleep After roaming the hills – I dream of my lover Seducing her best friend Is it because I remembered you? Its summertime, grass becoming Green-grey ink in the moonlight Perhaps, the crows’ calling at dusk flooded my mind With images of eyes, devoured From severed heads, skewered On Traitor’s Gate – I’m wondering What an eye tastes like Cargo shucked from a withered carcass Too-firm or too-fleshy – A glutinous gobstopper Morning sticks in my throat; salt and copper Pattern of your dress, colour of your hair That breeze – a broken telephone, whispering in my ear Cool as the finger of doubt walking down my spine.
A response to the prompt here
Though begun 24/07/2024, I came back to this poem several times, which is part of the reason I never published it on substack at the time.
The other part is, I liked it and thought it might be nice to spread elsewhere, however, it’s bloody long and perhaps not reflective enough of my other poems (though it is thematic).
For a while, I’d included another sentence at the end, in reference to the narrator’s present lover as I felt the single mention too brief but the emotions didn’t hang as well, so it was excised.