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Writer's pictureChris Nash

Beached

Updated: Mar 12, 2020

Temple-dark dawn's first light

mothering forth love,refugee

from the womb~sea's history;

a tide carrying the child, death.


Hope-blind from gassed stars;

word bombs cluster, calling

agasp from hacking trees,

leaf by choking brown leaf;

driving you free, exiled over

droning, speculated horizons.


Ours, the shingle mind

of the eastern shore,

a~shift in the treachery

of islanding arabesques;

scrawling out bestiaries

of Sogdian subtlety

on the iron Baltic air;

' Our wyrd, an amber pulse,

a word-worshiping surf,

of far-migrant tongues.'


Out, out wide over whale-

roading waves of winter,

these white-arcing wings,

heaven-streaming gulls,

trawl this frothing island

and its mew of migrations.


On thermals threading from

funeral silvered Sutton Hoo

to slave silvered Timbuktu;

this flotsam-weathered 'we',

home from oceans, beached

sea-ward, we reverse refugees,

stunned into a sun~like stillness,

seeking the undying surge,

of the sea : wave dark graves:

a wing tip's horizon of peace.


Notes:

Sogdiana was the kingdom at one end of the ancient silk roads. The Sogdians were the greatest merchants of the silk roads.


'Wyrd' is an Anglo~Saxon word connoting destiny or fate.


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