Passage to America

The beautiful sea-cry, 'All's Well!'
heard through a veil,
two syllables in a darkness of a night at sea.
A lantern swung to and fro with the motion of the ship;
through the open slide-door, a glimpse of a grey night sea,
phosphorescent foam flying,
swift as birds, into the wake,
and the horizon rising and falling
as the vessel rolled to the wind.
Below, on the first landing,
lads and lasses danced,
in jigs and reels and hornpipes;
a god made of the fiddler.
In a different quarter, a more forlorn party,
the motion, here, in the ship's nose, violent;
the uproar of the sea overpoweringly loud.
The yellow flicker of the lantern
spun round and round.
The human noises of the sick (sea-sick, dog-sick),
joined into a kind of farmyard chorus.
A man, run wild with terror,
cried with a thrill of agony,
'The ship's going down!'
Repeated, in a whisper,
his voice rising towards a sob.
The emotion of his voice catching.

Picture credit: Woman on ship deck looking out to sea, (also known as girl at ship's rail), 1835, Maurice Prendergast (source: WikiArt).

Inspired by The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson (from Steerage Scenes).

Written September 2021.

A Passage, A Letter, A Story

A letter placed by the side of another, then perhaps another, and another, nudging each other, to form a word, a single word, leading on to perhaps a whole string of them like charms on a bracelet. A passage, a letter, a story. Mere tangles of words, the string played with over and over; the knots grow tighter, the string plays with another similar, different coloured, ball. Inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable. Better never to have been written at all. But ah! freedom; the freedom of letters placed side by side. A mere outcry; a wild outburst. A flight; a shout, that echoes, echoes, echoes... nonsense; and again trails off, dot, dot, dot. Silence. How still the self, the voice has become. How still the world...but no! There is noise. A bird discoursing to itself or another; the sound of a train running over the tracks Sutton-here-I-come, Sutton-I-come; the constant hum of an air conditioner, one long exhale. People, animals, objects going about their lives.
The self, paused, once more pipes up. 'But', just as the narrator of An Unwritten Novel also asks, 'when the self speaks to self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world – a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.'
Up and down, up, down...
Yes, the self muses, a coward; and no beauty, except perhaps in lantern-light. A rare light to be sure. Worshipping things, soft living things and hard solid things with its softening light. All sharp angles gone. All marks covered.
The mind, under this dimmed light, no less quick in thought but absent-minded in action. A book placed where an empty cup should have been left, an empty cup where the book should be. A set of pyjamas moved back to where they've just been moved from, then moved again to where they should be; and joining in the doing, therefore, all pleasant and disagreeable thought, that no crack in the paintwork or mark on the wall, even if seen and looked at, could put a full stop to.

Picture credit: Lantern and Flashlight, Dan Witz (source: WikiArt).

Quote from An Unwritten Novel by Virginia Woolf. See Selected Short Stories, Penguin Classics.

Journal entry, September 2021.

Maturity

Maturity, more abstracted, more surreal. As the poet matures, perhaps in years, perhaps experience, perhaps expression, so does the poetry. I think this is true of many a writer – poet or novelist, unless their debut is dazzling. I think this is true of many a person, unless what they see and learn of the world stalls them; keeps them locked in place or makes them retreat.
Where it's written, I prefer the more anguished early years; later it's more hidden, cloaked in metaphors. Youth have that freedom; adults must resist it, not speak of it, and not write openly of it. For, angst should have disappeared, as years were gained, as the adult face emerged, beneath the youthful one.

Picture credit: The Poet, 1911, Pablo Picasso (source: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Wikipedia).

From journal, September 2021.