Saturday, November 06, 2004

Found an old scrapbook while cleaning my room. The pages reek of teenage angst - did I really write all that?

btw, does anyone know the author of this poem?
The Swimmer

Windhover, gliding
On the blue firmament
Of noonday water
I ride at ease
And see below me
Fathomed in twilight
Primeval mountains
Under seas.

Barnacle-snowcapped,
Their peaks, sliding
Beneath the wing-tip
Which is my hand,
Shadow the gorge
And the dark weed stirring
Its forest fleece in a
Tidal wind.

If God, dividing
The light from the darkness,
Moved on the face of
Earlier seas
And called forth creatures
From every crater,
Where once erupted
Anemones

(The great eel
As long as a valley,
The lunar crab
On a hill's brow
Squid with the cataract
Tentacles tumbling
Waterfall-white to the
Rocks below)

What man dare fathom
This land's mystery
With no lodestar
To bear him light
But a constellation
Of sunstruck fishes
Falling in fragments
Through the night?

The formatting's slightly off. The 4th and 8th lines of each stanza are not supposed to be up against the left margin.

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