“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
and Death shall have no Dominion.”
Dylan Thomas 

Suite Ste. Luce
5-10 / 14

5

Early morning mist:

a shadow heron
clacks its beak
at a ring of mobbing gulls.

6

When the mist clears,
heron draws
his neck into a bow
and fires
the arrow of his beak
into a fish.

The gulls run wild,
clawing up the sky
on a ladder of sound.

7

Seagull:

a coat-hanger, hanging from
a blue sky-rail,

white wings braced
against the flow of air.

8

Herring gulls hovering,
white doves
round the old man’s head;

a halo
of clacking red-ringed beaks
livid against the sky.

Brazen voiced,
these peace doves,
mewling for their daily bread.

9

Black
cormorants pinning
their wings to dry
on the wind’s
rough cross-beams.

10

The dead crab,
alive an eye blink ago:

 body exit left
(with the black backed gull)

legs exeunt right
(with herring gull attendants).

Crowd scene:
a chorus
of crows-in-waiting.

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
and Death shall have no Dominion.”
Dylan Thomas 

Suite Ste. Luce
1-4 / 14

 1

Black backed gulls,
nature’s alarm clocks,
waking the seaside
with their glaucous rattle.

High tide? Low tide?
We have drifted on our life raft
far from the grasping hands
of city clocks.

Gulls breakfast on the beach.
Day’s rhythm all at sea.

 2

6 am? 7 am? 8 am?
What do they mean?

The planet’s slow revolution?
This sun arc sketched in its stretch of sky?

Salt spray combing seaside fingers
through a young girl’s hair.

A man in a red boat, fishing.

3

Bare toes grip
damp wrinkled sand.

 Worms have written
runes in their arcane
wriggling script.

What do they tell us,
these secret messages?

Sunburned now,
the bare beach itches:
like tanned leather,
like salt on a fish skin
nailed drying to a frame.

4

The salt air drives its freshness,
needles knitting through my chest.

Slowed heartbeat of the dormant beach,
the tide’s blood flowing,
in and out,
inflating, deflating
the beach’s sandy lung.