Sea bloom

A shore. A path of stones past temples fallen long before
any tales we know. Scents of evening herbs – fennel,
calamint, spurge – of antique earths. No one following,
no one before. No voices from a present time, no line dividing
sea from sky. The mist curved high, immense, a hyacinth blue.
 
Hyacinth blue. And in that blue throb history and myth, sails white
and black and amaranth, the calls of sailors, sirens, monsters, gods.
A moment – rare – in which the Med brings forth its ghosts, to sail once more
to Ithaca, Calypso’s isle, or Troy. Behind the mist, ships clamorous
with shouts and arms, that fade to flutes and songs and sighs.
 
Songs and sighs borne over centuries and seas to shores
cemented by the years, herbs withered, dried; the shouts, the cries
and clamours of today that drown the music of the ancient seas where,
by bleached stones crumbled long before any tales we know, few
gaze at dusk when sea and sky dissolve in a vault of hyacinth blue.
 
Hyacinth blue. The only other colour in that dusk an oyster white
of temples fallen long before, a path bleached pale, a bloodless moon
scything mists of hyacinth blue. No one beside me on the path, though
many have passed before. Too late now to board those ships lost
in mists of hyacinth blue. No new tales of heroes, gods. No sea, no sky.
 
No sea, no sky. Beyond this mist lie lands laid waste, dry desert fires,
the fading sounds of those whose cries are lost in sand, the tries of some
to board those ships and cross to where we so easily stand. Heroes?
Perhaps, not gods but men who would survive unsung, daring
sea and sky and myth to build new lives. Their shore a path of stones.
 

Gabriel Griffin

published in Poets Meet Painters, 2011, Hungry Hill Writing, Co. Cork

 
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Böcklin’s Tomb

     After the painting ‘le tombeau de Böcklin’ by Ferdinand Keller, Germany. 1901-1902
     Musée Imaginaire des Arts et de la Métaphore
 
On an island, of course, of
marble and granite, shadow
 
sad, cypress gloomed, hemmed
by a motionless lake; hewn
 
into the mountain
a tomb open and waiting.
 
No breath moves trees’ leaf, no
boat glides, no oar thrusts; no
 
fish stirs dark waters that
relinquish no mirror, that
 
quench no-one’s thirst. The
inevitable figure wears
 
not winding sheet nor
shroud but a mantle
 
of darkness, and stands
at the threshold where angels
 
are fixed in lament, their mouths
set in howls, their tears turned to stone.
 
All is heavy and silent, there’s
no Virgil, no Dante, no
 
guide to the underworld, no one
to follow, no hand
 
is outstretched. Böcklin
waits alone at the entrance
 
under wisteria he
would never have painted –
 
besides, he died
in October –
 
knocking hard with his staff
on a wide-open door.
 

Gabriel Griffin

published in BBAC Anthology 2014, ed. Martyn Crucefix

 
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Seascapes

Snap, b/w. Welsh coast. Bucket ’n spade, the sand
buzzing our knees, the shade under our sunhats’ flap
 
scratched by the slaps, the suck, the shingle’s rush
loud down the throat of the ravenous waves.
 
*
 
Postcard, the North Sea. Four of us, salmon in upleaps
stabbing the breakers, swimming out on the swell, calling
 
in salt tongues, youth splicing the surge. Fog
without warning borne fast on the tide, smothering
 
the day’s light, stifling shouts, choking cries. Out of time, out
of bearing, a world with no maydays, lost to drown in ourselves.
 
*
 
Kodacolour, the Med in our twenties. The apricot flaming, our ripe
bodies rising, our turquoise desires. The Med is a maitresse, painting us
 
whores. Scented with myrtle, with cumin, with fennel, from
black rocks a June night in the moonless I flickered
 
into the waves. It was ease, it was ecstasy, unseen creatures
coiled round me, my delight was in darkness, my lover the sea.
 
*
 
Pencil sketch: the estuary. About the end of September. The beach
is a wash-out, what’s left is all trash. Beachcomber and dropout,
 
jogger, flasher and freak, say just one of each. I walk
avoiding the dogs in the last light, watch out for the bite
 
of glass or syringe. Tankers stain the horizon, in and out
to the port, corrupting the dusk. The tide here looks worn out, no
 
hope of rising. Yet I know in November the swollen hump of the sea
will creep over the boulders, sway down the wide wall, rustle
 
into the cane beds, rinse through the allotments, wipe out
the land. No coast, nowhere to walk, to stand. Only sea.
 

Gabriel Griffin

published online The Westmoreland Gazette

 
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The Bellingshausen Sea

     the Russian Admiral von Bellingshausen was the first person to sight Antarctica (1821)
 
This sea had locked its secret in ice, never revealed
the fire in its heart; silenced long ago the star stone’s
whistle, bite, the way waters sprang and, hissing, seethed,
their scalding mist cremating life around the unseen shore.
 
No Med, this sea, no Red Sea, coral-laced, no Pacific swell;
no swimmer, surfer, castle-builder on some sandy beach.
Hurtling down the sides of iced volcanoes prevail
furious katabatic winds that churn discordant seas.
 
His crew caught silverfish, deepwater smelt, rock cod, surprised
the fountain of a humpbacked whale; in their wake
snow petrels pattered in the waters’ troughs, on deck
a sheathbill skittered, crying ‘cawk-cawk--cawk’.
 
The ship smashed through the sea, its troubled ice,
no vision but the winding sheets of mist. No sign
of life was seen, no port, lighthouse, village, shack;
what man could live in that white wilderness?
 
He’d found a continent named but never seen; his eyes
spied peaks rise jagged over obelisks of ice. He wondered –
before this land retreated from the sun, could snow and ice
conceal, far, far below, a trace of life?
 
Perhaps, deep under ice were skeletons of leaves,
the outlines of some beast man’s never known,
or, in blocked caves, bones carved or carefully heaped,
on rock a constellation traced, a handprint, blown.
 
The first to see that coast, yet he refrained
from landing on that pristine, trackless waste.
He left no footprint in its snows, no smear; no blood
stained its chill purity – that’s left to us.
 
 
     Note: an asteroid impacted these waters over 2 million years ago
 

Gabriel Griffin

published in Not a Drop, ed. Rebecca Bilkau, 2017, Beautiful Dragons.net

 
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