Tired of Islands

Published on by Laura Bloomsbury 
That sail
The elemental center 
For home,  
For swallows and household fires
That father and husband's longing
That love of order
In every gull's outcry
As the dialect names of skies  

For the sea-wanderer 
The fields are evenings long
The conclusions of exhausted surf
In the high right hand of Ireland. 

Sea Grapes ~ Derek Walton

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name
in every gull’s outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore
now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough
from whose groundswell the great hexameters come
to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Deep Ulster ~ Harry Clifton

It was there, the elemental center, 
All the time. Eternally present, repeating itself   
Like seasons, where the times and dates  
For swallows and household fires are written down,   

The grouse are counted, the quotas of stocked rainbows.  
All that love of order, for its own sake.   
Only the hill-farms, and the high sheep country   
Above politics—the enormous relief

Up there, as the dialect names of skies 
Return, along with their clouds, and the old knowledge   
Opens the mind again. To dream, to just potter   
In the yard, to fiddle with local stations   

In the kitchen, where news that is no news   
Finally, at last, fills up the years  
With pure existence. Lit from beneath  
The fields are evenings long, the tree by the house …

In a state plantation                                    Nowhere but here
In the high right hand of Ireland, do the weather fronts   
Give way so slowly, to such ambivalent light.

Joining dVerse’s Open Link Night with this cento/patchwork poem of alternate lines from ‘Sea Grapes’ by Derek Walcott & Harry Clifton’s ‘Deep Ulster’. Title taken from ‘Sea Grapes’

26 thoughts on “Tired of Islands”

  2. I admire the new found poem, and love the writing process of erasing from 2 poems. Beautiful. Hope we can use this process in one of our sessions.

  5. the view of land for the sailor is very different than the view of the land for the landlubber. It’s a fun exercise and satisfying to put a poem together the way you did, from others’

  7. Beautifully done Laura, I haven;t come across this approach before… Very stimulating – thank you…

  10. OH… I feel this poem, the contentment of home and the longing we always have for it no matter how far flung we are form it… I’d love to see what people would come up with in a found poem given two poems as a prompt.

    1. you certainly honed in on the feelings both poems evoke, even in their synthesis.
      p.s. Look out then for my MTB prompt in the quite near future

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