Poems by Paganlite

The Lie of the Land

Out on the island gulls splatter suffocated air
It is pale dawn
The glassy ocean
Rolls, shards, splinters
And somewhere deep
It surfaces
Seal hooded
Nuzzling rocky clefts
Nudging this winkling of tears
A muted calling
The pebbled shore knocks its shoal of eggs loose
Right to the heave of my door
Beached high
In my mind’s turning a shadow
Wafts
Fragile shell
Bone silver
Dipped in dew
My lungs are straining caves
Breathing you in the cut air
Behind the shutters of my eyes you lie
Still balanced above me
Rocking with the waves spitting on my pane
Your golden iris open as a star
Your lips embroidering
Seamless letters on my throat’s shore
Forever forever forever


29/09/2009

Wracked

We are still the same here
Wracked by trite syllables
Tapped in code
On the ocean drawl
We cling to wreckage
Survivors of your cunning craft
Shored on sticks of memory
And other inky stains
Blotted envelopes, bedraggled cards
Drowned caskets
You screamed a shallow warning
Like some rag rent cormorant
Hermited at sea
On a cool cape of moon
Barren as urns

I am not raided by your bone rattle
My heart’s shell clammed close
Tight lipped
Anemones hid red eyes between webbed toes
And guppies open jawed flashed scales
Between the barnacled ventricles of my heart
I have been dry as a salt pan for weeks
Mobilising ribs into a shoal of forgetting
My mouth’s purse babbling on
Currents pulling in deep
My ears lopped off
Hollow gilled
Hooked by strained lines
Flung on brine with no weight
To anchor them
My seal pelt skinned
Hung out and nailed
Flapping on blistering winds
My tongue a stone
Knocking knocking
In the addit of my mouth
Waiting a break in the tide


Tuesday, 29 September 2009


Beachcombing

I comb the pebbled shore for bits of you
Your smile a curve of wood sea smooth rimed
Your laugh a bubble of oystercatcher bursting on calm skies
Your iris the flame of lichen on freckled boulders
Your touch the glide of a sail feathering waves
Your taste the salt on the spray
And the last trail of sweet peas
Your heart the deep pulse of tides
Your voice the seal’s call
Out out on banished rocks
Bereft
Mewling
In the midnight deep

Tuesday, 29 September 2009


Thankyou to Rene and Carol Anne Duffy for the inspirationxx