Never Forget - Titanic Day, April 15th
(Oh, I’m done with wearing black, shedding tears,
Pouring out my ocean. I’ll live without their invitations;
Dowager teas of violet and cinnamon. I’ll live without so many things, you’ll see)
In a solitude of the sea, deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, all still now couches she -
(Slowly falling, beams of light filter through that darkening shroud, for a silent moment
Dancing on lost Titanic’s shattered bow)
Steel chambers, late the pyres of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thread and turn to foamed and rusted bowers -
(Did he cry my name as you filled up his mouth? Surging over lips I’d kissed with my own warm tide;
Jealously replacing breath that I blew to fill his body
Over the mirrors meant to glass the opulent,
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent -
(Immortality as memory – his Irish lit, the rippling sea,
“Love makes heroes of us all,” he laughed; the deep was in his eyes,
Jewels in joy designed to ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind-
(You have my ring, and my wedding gown too,
That porcelain dish, the postcard from France,
The pressed flowered note where first he wrote
Dim moon-eyed fishes near gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
(His breath vapour earth notes of apple and whisky –
“It’s women and children first, you know – here, let me do up these buttons.
Can’t have the others thinking, luv, that I let you go all sixes and sevens.”)
Well: while was fashioning this creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate for her — so gaily great —A Shape of Ice,
For the time far and separate -
(In his one good shirt and in his brown Sunday shoes,
Going to stand with the men from first-class, made equal by your ministrations at last,
Waving goodbye with that blue handkerchief my mother had sewn for our wedding)
And as the smart ship grew in stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too…
(Somewhere I know he waits for me: patience becomes
My lost Titanic, and forever will come for us soon enough
Beneath the north Atlantic)
A manipulation of three poems:
"The Convergence of the Twain"
with apologies and gratitude to the authors...
dededos
annaxmalina
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