John Beaton

John Beaton Poems

John Beaton Biography

John writes metrical poetry and has moderated one of the internet's foremost metrical poetry workshops. His work has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites it in spoken word performance. He has published a book of poems titled 'Leaving Camustianavaig.' A retired actuary, raised in the Scottish Highlands, he lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.

John Beaton Comments

The Best Poem Of John Beaton

The Breathing Sea

Whale-breath blasts up through the moonlight
in a bubble-net of vapor;
trade-winds catch the spout and droplets
stream through palm baleen on Maui.

Past upcountry jacarandas,
spray condenses to a petal
in the lei that the clouds lay
round the mountainsides of Maui.

Over old volcano vent-pipes,
mothered as within an oyster,
mist impearls—a raindrop rolling
down the gardened gowns of Maui.

Flowed and flumed, it shoots a valley,
slows, and steals into the ocean,
scintillating as the sea-shirr
shawls the birthing grounds of Maui.

Underneath that sheen, lunge-feeders,
filled with krill and Arctic pilchards,
sing of their returning journeys
from the Bering Sea to Maui.

Haleakala's great crater
once shot stars; a living mountain
blows the moisture from its blowhole
to the midnight skies of Maui.

Whale-breath blasts up through the moonlight
in a bubble-net of vapor;
trailing droplets bathe the spoutlet
of a humpback calf in Maui.