Barbara Mitchell

Barbara Mitchell Poems

The Best Poem Of Barbara Mitchell

Whale...South Uist.

A trinity of vertebrae on a carpet of stone,
a cathedral of sea-worship built of bone.
Scoured clean of flesh that once powered you across oceons
following moon-paths, pulled by stars.
Out beyond the edge sounds an echo of your mighty voice
bugling your need to distant kin,
troubador, wandering minstrel...I hear you sing.
This is where your pilgrim years have brought you,
South Uist the table for your bones.
Fretful and fearsome the sea arranges coasts and lives
and, in the deep, the caller calls you in.
...If I could have been a bird I might have seen your vast shadow slipping through glass,
adored the diamonds in the fountain of your head.
As a barnacle on your back I would have shared with you the naked air;
been taken down to search along the feet of continents.
Now, your grandeur is dead.
You, who fired the sea like a gun now lie crumbling under the sun.
Consumed by some dark grief my hand caresses the long road of your spine.
I watch the waves slop and reach and wonder what you may have had to teach?
May I come once more when night reclaims the colour from the sky
and warm your cooling bones with mine?
And, if I sleep, will you come and take me flying down the deep?
Will you sing, as once you sang below the blanket of the sea?
Will you forgive? Accept a tear from me?

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