Forty Years On

40 years after the shipwreck came the following poem;
it’s a sort of elegy, a sort of celebration of survival,
and a sort of condensation of trauma.

Forty Years On

Life holds us casually
a thin thread stretching
credulity to snapping point.

The sudden blue sky after take-off
as the plane climbs, banks, and then
the fragile frame fills with smoke.
Belief in flight first fades
then burns and falls away. Fire
in the engine, wing scorching,
screaming down to earth
to land on foam
and slide to shrieks and sirens
and see the fantasy of flight
stripped to the bone.

And later, air having proved
unreliable, we trust ourselves
to water. Not capsuled now,
we stand, we walk on deck.
Wood underfoot, and under that
the sea, immense and dark.
Floating is easily understood.

Light fades, the harbour
recedes. Wind grows,
waves irrationally loom overhead
and oh we’re so small
a drop in the ocean
and the water
impossibly tall
as the hurricane howls
and hurls us into
the night.

And later, water having proved
unreliable, after the shipwreck
and after coming to terms
with survival, repairing the damage,
replacing all that was lost,
we live on an island.
A fragment of earth
hovering between water and air.

We burn in the salt and the sun.
We find only dust.
We cannot survive the mistrust
that misfortune has left us –
there is no longer
an element to live in
nor medium for us
to grow in.

Love, lacking confidence,
dies. Life, lacking meaning,
goes on in improbable ways
filling the space
between starting and ending.

Derek Coe
October 2010

Please follow and like my posts: