Monday 18 April 2016

The Poet is an Albatross




Like birds we are, migratory birds, eyes bright
gazing into and away from ourselves,
the ocean – spinning words teasing to be traversed;
cold currents swirling into white-foamed sentences, waves
of thought, of hunger, of homelessness, for we have no home
no place to remain, only the journey there and back again;
each flap of our enormous wings lifting us
or settling us again and always the smell of sound
calling to us, the inner compass begging us to try again

and again

and I feel sometimes
as if these wings have grown too heavy,
feathers frozen with salt air, the scent
a stinging rebuke -
failure
heavy as the laden atmosphere
for this solitary journey always appears
and finds a space between me
and those I hold dear.

I would like to rest,
to nest in a high mountain far inland
where I cannot hear the ocean,
allow my wings to fall mute
and rest in silence

but then a breeze catches my wings,
lifts a particle of me again into the air
and soon the words become the currents
and I am soaring again,
prescient with the image that I will land
(already the song of heaviness of that journey
anchoring me tiredly again)
but while I soar I give myself over
to look upon it all and try once more
to capture a feeling in a phrase,
the universe in a pause.

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