The murmuring shell of time

Published on by Laura Bloomsbury

“Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.”
T.S.Eliot

I
The watcher on a headland
a paddler on the shore
some have come for so much more
than seascapes. To hear clouds
whip up a storm of questions
deliberations, contemplations.
Where waves repeat over and over
the message we cannot quite make out
its echo trapped in shells of whelk
sotto voce in the fog of the wrecked
between the sweep of the lighthouse beam

II
Rivers run headlong
just to slay themselves at the mouth
and the sea disgorges like a Jonah
all its sunken salmagundi. Still these runes
go unremarked by dulled denizens
So too that oh so redolent scent of Aurelians
a withered gourd, the fire forever cold
in an expendable grate.

III
Time travellers one and all;
going. gone, arriving with a sigh
as though nothing changes but position
as if destinations were always and only
the end of a line
of rails, footsteps and rubbered
tracks  in tarmac. 

But setting is the sole constancy;
we travellers are exchanged,
forever and all ways
fleet as the second hand ticks past 
our passions and shadows
all played out on arrival
elsewhere.

For Sanaa’s Poetics prompt: Monopoly with a Twist, she invokes a literary landscape with a challenge to write a response poem inspired by one from a given selection. I’ve chosen T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages“, a multi-layered, existential storm cloud kind of poem from which this title and epigraph is taken. It is the third part of Eliot’s “Four Quartets“.

21 thoughts on “The murmuring shell of time”

  1. This is exquisitely drawn, Laura! Wow! I especially admire this part; “Rivers run headlong just to slay themselves at the mouth.” Thank you so much for writing to the prompt 💜💜

  2. I love the title of your poem, Laura, and the choice of Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’ for epitaph and inspiration. I love the idea of hearing ‘clouds whip up a storm of questions / deliberations, contemplations’ and the echo of a message ‘trapped in shells of whelk’, so very British and familiar. Yes, we are time travellers.

    1. I have read and re-read Eliot so many times over the years, that I can almost channel a shadow of him without effort – even so re-reading The Dry Salvages for this prompt felt like a fresh deep dive

  7. I love the thought murmurs in this…the message we cannot quite make out… my favourite is the the ending stanzas. Beautifully written.

  9. The title is magnificent, Laura, as is the poem as a whole, one in homage to Eliot in style and also in thought.

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