The Sea
grey. Grey, puckered with grey rain, the grey
skin of a face never recovered from adolescent
pustules. Or, a grey suit, mottled, under
a pin-striped sky. The sea grey. Yet late
medieval, 17th and 18th century artists thought
the sea green. Hendrik Vroom,
the Dutch naval painter depicting the exploding
Spanish flagship at Gibraltar, employed the see-through
quality of the dreamily green sea to show how
the drowning mariners’ torsos and torn limbs
extended beneath the waves. In the fore-sea,
to the right, the usual decorative barrel with man
clinging to it. How I marvelled as a child. But I
painted my sea blue. With holidays greying from super-
-vision, it wasn’t the sea that was grey. No, not
the sea. One windswept sunrise running
along the beach I met with a stranded porpoise.
Its smiling mouth open in answer, but so softly
spoken, so self-deprecating I didn’t catch
his name. So I prodded him and out
streamed the maggots. His skin beautifully
brown, an undamaged sack. In London I often
meet kids with backpacks shaped like nearly
extinct animals, containing
their course books on Western Civ.
These poems (pages 2 & 3) were submitted to a national competition in 1995. The authors, whose initials are thought to be JA and DW, are invited to identify themselves.
Page(s) 3
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
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