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Thomas Blackburn

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Trewarmett

Darkness, feathers are shed;
These birds are gathered back
By the enormous hand
That cast them at dawn seaward
In crumbs of living bread
To their forefathering rock.

Piercing the lense of a wave,
From the beat of it and the swell
The feathered life they have
Is indivisible,
As from the undertow
And skin of a nervous sea
Fish and themselves also
They reap perpetually.
Being clothed and without a seam
In the pouring waters they thread,
How can they miss their aim,
By the loose surge targetted
Forever towards their home.

Darkness, feathers are shed,
From this bird-whitened stone
I watch a cormorant pluck
Life from the nervous sea,
With a moon behind my back,
Conscious of God knows what
Anxious irrelevance,
As these birds swim in the eye
Of the green circumstance
From which I am undone
By my duplicity.

Watching a bird, and a man
Watching a bird in the surf,
Watched by a man, and that faint
Rim of horizon far off
Where darkness breeds from a glint
Of metal, I wait for the tide
To work its equation out.
Though hunger, compulsive dread,
By a moon’s impetus
That takes the sea by the throat,
Are ghosts forever unlaid,
I assert as it gathers up all
Of night to one moment of stress
That is perpetual,
My own selfconsciousness.
The waters boom and rave,
Being human what else can I have
Than such good and growing pain,
Between the living and dead,
On this sea-shaken stone.

 

Page(s) 13-14

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