Caitriona O'Reilly
The Harbour in January
Maybe this landscape never frowned
and spoiled its early blue face.
Above, like an arched eyebrow,
a single crow makes broken circles.
Birds in the hedge confer in boiling voices.
It takes a large design to displace
mercury-heavy rolls like these –
water relaxing its folds of fabric.
It sees us bend from cockpit or quayside
and gives us shivering bodies, splintered
faces and hands. We aren’t ourselves in it.
Like a glamorous uncrossed desert,
the sea’s of mobile feature. Any ship’s legacy
is a smile that widens and complicates
and gapes to take in all the bay and me –
not of the sea, not in it, just looking on
at how the purple undertow reveals itself
in surfacing, in lapsing platinum.
Page(s) 55
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