What the Sea Remembers

by Felicity Plunkett


Haul and wail of sea-birds
who make it their mirror and bowl

Rough lines that disclose
its crawl into land, its hold

Discarded things, repository
of the lost and wave-tossed, shellf-

racture, plastic, atlas
of breakage, axis

trashed and washed. Lost
plants, rootless and torn

laid out to curate, forlorn, and if
there are tears here, call them salt

The sea remembers. Its roar
is dies irem. White flat moan and call

of trauma, of recall. Froth
and spit of weeping. Trace

of all forgetting would erase.
Relics of a life, however brief.

In its vast archive my grief
is a small file. The sea has cradled

bodies, undone them, organ
by organ: the sea dead, the lost

to earth. Never buried. The sea
stamps its name on all you set free.

 

Felicity-Plunkett (1).png

Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, critic and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Vanishing Point (UQP) and Seastrands (Vagabond Press) and the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP). She is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press.

Previous
Previous

Shards

Next
Next

The Poetry of Money