And yet these unbearable deaths are borne by those who turn away. As I am left mute with horror, I shall post these poems which I think speak to the deaths of so many in this watery graveyard: from Salt By Nayyirah Waheed you broke the ocean in half to be here. only to meet nothing […]
Silt Stephen Burt Things you know but can’t say, the sort of things, or propositions that build up week after week at the end of the day, & have to be dredged by the practical operators so that their grosser cargo & barges & boxy schedules can stay. The great shovels and beaks and the […]
9 February 2015 20.00 “Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, [… the] prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick For the next few days, we shall be traveling on the sea in a monotony of sunshine, humidity, warmth, and reading […]
6 February 2015 “For a ship is a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king.” (Melville, White-Jacket – did Conrad plagiarise Melville as I often think he does? See the Conrad quote I use as an epigram) This might have been […]
The Sea is History By Derek Walcott Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, like a light at the end of a tunnel, […]
A Small Invitation By Yannis Ritsos Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar Come to the luminous beaches─he murmured to himself here where the colors are celebrating─look─ here where the royal family never once passed with its closed carriages and its official envoys. Come, it won’t do for you to be seen─he used to say─ […]
The Aerodrome By Seamus Heaney First it went back to grass, then after that To warehouses and brickfields (designated The Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate), Its wartime grey control tower blanched and glazed Into a hard-edged CEO style villa: Toome Aerodrome had turned to local history. Hangars, bomb stores, nissen huts, the line Of perimeter barbed […]
[Untitled] By Octavio Paz, Trans. Muriel Rukeyser At daybreak go looking for your newborn name Over the thrones of sleep glittering the light Gallops across all mountains to the sea The sun with his spurs on is entering the waves Stony attack breaking the clarities The sea resists rearing to the horizon Confusion of […]
Children, the Sandbar, That Summer By Muriel Rukeyser Sunlight the tall women may never have seen. Men, perhaps, going headfirst into the breakers, but certainly the children at the sandbar. Shallow glints in the wave suspended we knew at the breaker line, running that shore at low tide, when it was safe. The grasses whipped […]
Marseilles Walter Benjamin The street . . . the only valid field of experience. – Andre Breton Marseilles-the yellow-studded maw of a seal with salt water running out between the teeth. When this gullet opens to catch the black and brown proletarian bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of […]
