El Mina (1482-1982)
...For a man and girl
One roll tobacco, one string pipe coral,
One gun, three machetes, one blunderbuss...
-Slaver's logbook
Out on the motel patio we quaff beer,
Idly watch the sandwhite and palmfringed beach,
Silverfish gilding the Atlantic blue,
A motorised canoe painted many colours,
Fitful swoop of swifts. An hour earlier
We viewed the backbones of a stranded whale
Stacked like weird animistic millstones
In the mildewed shade of a boatman's shrine.
Stuff for postcards, perhaps, touristica,
Except that that other Leviathan,
History, scales the breeze with flashbacks;
Clink of shackle, mouthlock, those forced farewells
Flotsam conscience still, strangers multiplying
Strangers, bartering birthrights for trinkets,
Greedily daring the world's wet edge
In schizoid quest. Quick profits, quick deaths.
Out on the headland, where the land dips down
Their fortress rests, part-museum now,
Part-primary-school with whitewashed walls
Peeled to a quincentennial eczema;
Instead of fluttering tricolour or cross
A coconut tree provides its standard.
Shadows fester within window sockets.
Along the horizon then out to sea,
As once the mainsails were hoisted skyward,
LiFlgering snatches of shanties infect
The Trades' long breath, ancestral dirges,
Captains' holloas. The motel steward
Approaches with our bill as if in rescue.
The swifts swoop on, that canoe become a speck-
From generation to generation
Haunted thunder of the waves' salt drum.
Page(s) 17
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The