THE BROWN SEA
Injury, longing, and changed days.
Find beauty wherever you can.
Following a severe injury during a visit to the beach, I fell out of love with my lifelong sweetheart, the North Sea. An emotionally difficult project start to finish, worked on for the duration of Lockdown. See the full transcript of the poetry below.
THE BROWN SEA
Salten, sour wind,
Blow just so.
Gasp through my windows,
And carry the racket
Of the seafront rails.
I waited for the trees to bud,
For the birds to return,
For what she took to wash back in.
The rails went on,
And the wind
Bore their singing into me.
That was the start of the obsession.
On the hottest day last summer,
We tried to go camping on the beach.
I remember myself
Seeing the sea,
And Sinking
Like a deer in the tar.
She washed up her filth and urban ichor,
And slithered swift right up to the shore.
She broke me down,
Snatched me under,
And took my heart
Back out with the tide.
Dislocated knee.
Torn anterior cruciate ligament.
It's never healed right.
I think the North sea
Is cursed.
They should call it the Brown Sea:
Nothing but shit.
Tarmac desert,
Brown-field cathedral,
Sweet wild wasteland, with your rabbits devout,
Sigh your floral, rotten breath.
Like concrete cracks,
The silver tracks
Offer delicate hands
To all life in the sprawl.
Around the trainline’s wire fences,
Creep closer to find
A stinking urban paradise,
Where flies and bumblebees crawl.
Supposedly silver,
The Brown Sea breaches:
Gaping, groaning, higher than the stars.
Somnambulant sorrow,
Her greywater depths.
I wept whalesong all night.
All my life I have longed for the sea.
Baying metal beast,
Roar through me:
Polish these rails to Silver,
Replace the sea.
Scream,
Wash every weary night into day.
Shake the chain link fences loose,
Turn the wasteland once more into wilderness,
Glimmer on the horizon,
And bear me away.
