Where Have All The Mermaids Gone?

Fisher boys and sailors
learnt the lore of the sea
block your ears to Mermaids
or drown-ed you will be.

It was quieter then
just the creaking of wooden ships,
the slap of sails,
ropes running through blocks,
a rattle of chains.

Steam changed all that,
whining screws
echoing through water,
they drowned your song.

Ships passing too fast,
so many of them,
the noise too great,
your siren voices smothered.

Fisher boys and sailors
no longer heeded
the lore of the sea.
You faded to myths
like mist in sunlight.

Untethered

A place on the edge
between land and sea,
the muted colours
of sharp thin blue
un-grazed saltings grass,
thrift and purple sea lavender,
grey sea-washed mudbanks;
salt tanging the air.

In the estuary
flocks of birds
wash in and out
with the tide.
The pale sky
meets the sea
in that liminal place
where boundaries merge,
one becoming the other,
like lying
drowsy on the shore
before the soft slide
into the tides of sleep,
carrying your dreams.

Love song

Above him we planted a small tree
leaves deep chestnut like his fur.
In the spring, tiny white star flowers
and he shone, like them,
in my firmament.
He was mine,
if you can own any creature.
I was his sun, his moon.

Damaged by his rough birth,
head tilted in perpetual enquiry
always a little dizzy and deaf.
He’d watch my hands
as I taught him to do.

He’d push his bowl, one foot inside,
clattering across the floor,
to say he was hungry.
Curious as a child,
accepting of everything.
He gave, but took nothing.
His place always beside me.

Sometimes that space
is more than I can bear.

Moth

One egg amongst so many, silvered,
on the leaf’s underside.
Hatching, soft-bodied on multiple legs
and so very hungry.
Transforming in a husked shell, liquified,
born again.
White delicate wings, antennae
fernlike.
Caught by the light from
the window.

The girl was scared
of the fluttering aimlessness,
the night-time alien otherness
and threw a book.
It twitched where it lay
on the carpet.
She turned off the lamp,
the room was full of moonlight
and the scent of magnolias.

In the morning all that was left
was an imprint of wings in white.
Sometimes the dust regathered into
a ghost moth,
flitting down guilty dreams.

She taught her children to revere the moth,
planted her garden
with evening scented flowers
for those ethereal night-time pollinators.

The Passing of Plants

She’d name each one as we passed;
Vipers Bugloss, Bird’s Foot Trefoil,
Herb Robert, Alexander, Ragged Robin,
Stitchwort, Jack-in-the Hedge,
and so, I learnt.

My favourite time was Spring,
bright green, bluebell splash,
flat heads of cow parsley
gleaming white in dappled light
smelling musty, of spices
kept too long.

Of the plants I learned
many, once familiar are gone
through the flail’s vandalism,
hedgerows cut back too early
and too hard, no time to seed.

She too has gone,
her last years confined to bed,
living in her childhood,
yearning for the lanes, bright by-ways,
the scattering of light through leaves.