The Ward

1

      The Ward

         Part One

           I

I’ve got cancer of the spirit,

I was born in stage 4,

Smelt a rat from the beginning

And never asked for more,

Yet have joined the mermaids gasping

With walrus on the shore.

            II

Gasping at the idle sailors

Who tell tales round the mast

Of a boat that is as pickled

As the dogs who hold fast

To what is dredged from memory,

Curators of the past.

             III

I’ve been to this other country,

The seven drunken seas,

Where names and hearts that have been scored

On underwater trees

Are what remain, and may endure,

Of mariners’ memories.

            Part Two

         

           IV

Winds tug the hull and movement stirs

A sodden reverie:

The ship is going no where yet

The talk’s of what to be.

Tomorrow’s crew will chase fireflies

Across a sober sea.

            V

I take to task this idle crew,

Admonishing it thus:

The universe is not so much

Indifferent to us

As we, as humans, are to it,

Alive, incurious.

             VI

Along the shoreline I once roamed

Come others in my stead.

It’s difficult to say from here

Who leads and who is led,

Except to say they come in pairs,

The bi and quadruped.

              Part Three

              VII

With memories of primal man

As flotsam on the shore,

The sea lion is a king of sorts

Though no one’s heard him roar,

But merely bark while steering past

The scraps of sail and oar.

             VIII

A merman in fantastic depths

To sleeping mariner,

He goes in search of shoals of fish

For he’s no scavenger,

And finds them feeding on the wreck

Of a sunken treasure.

              IX

They scatter in a burst of light;

So illuminated,

The vessel is a startling sight,

Alien, transmuted,

From wreckage resting on the floor

Into tree uprooted.