Short Days, Long Shadows

[sheenaghpugh]

So I haz a new collection of poems out. They were written, mostly, while I still had a base in both Cardiff and Shetland, and are very much about leaving one place and becoming at home in another. Sort of Cardiff to Shetland with occasional stops-off in Norway (holidays) and the sixteenth century (Francis Walsingham's spy operation rendered in sestinas). From Seren, here. As you would gather from the title, they're a bit mortality-haunted. Here's one:

Come and Go

He has chosen, far nearer the end
than the beginning, to live
where, every day, he can watch the land

come and go, each time gleaming as if
it were new made. Sandbars shoulder
into the sun, their whereabouts too brief

to map, never drying out. Under
its pulsing skin the sea echoes
sunlight, shadows the clouds, goes undercover

in mist. What it is to be bodiless,
boneless, to reshape, to fill
with yourself the moulds of coves and bays,

take yourself back. He walks mile
after mile, blanking aches, stays up late
in the blue half-light, resists the pull

of sleep while he can, while his sight
still serves him, before that jerry-build,
his body, can no longer house a spirit
still nowhere near done with the world.