The Sea Sleeps Poem by Alan Gough

A steady rise and measured fall.
The endless sea breathes black and scattered white,
slowly leans against the land, stops
and has second thoughts slides down and out again
in an indifferent retreat.

A banker strikes his Mont Blanc through a
dark satanic mill and calmly sends
the workers home to mind the kids
and sit in pubs with friends.
Beware the officer in the shadows
warrant card at hand.
Beware the sniggering bobbies looking on
then going home to tidy wives and caravans.
Murder and uneasy guilt are in the air;
high priestess exits through a secret door.
Oh mother I despair at your despair.

All the time the sea sleeps on
with no concern for things above
and in its moods can argue with itself,
but settles down in time
and breathes a steady, heavy breath again
to push and pull the wasted land.
The water feels no grief, no pain.

In the holy cloisters quiet and candle lit;
at the dusty alter kneeled in prayer
the pious priest recites his lines by rote
then takes his candle
rises from his knees
and makes his furtive way
through ancient watchful corridors to a darker room
where sacred lust and bleak despair are bound
together in the shadows and the evil gloom.

Holy robes and candlesticks
and sleight of hand and other tricks.

In the deepest ocean caverns not yet charted
Black as the priest's borrowed bible
and the murderer's heart
the ocean goes about its slow eternal business
and lifts and places down the scattered pieces and
the polished bones of priests and clowns.

A dull man, low centre of gravity, a dead eyed Tsar no less sentences himself to
life in a golden prison cell with a hundred windows
looking on a warmer sea.
A couldn't-care-less sea.
An unimpressed sea.
But the dull man doesn't know he isn't free.
He's blinded by the kitsch and tasteless bling
delivered by a wealthy chef
who leaves his kitchen, poisons simmering.

But the sea knows, the sea knows all.
It knows the banker and the copper
knows the priest and politician
The golden cell, the chef's position
The dark and guilty room
those with a silver spoon.
All will be pulled to the depths
where bones are picked clean
and scrubbed white
in the dark reckoning
of the blackest night.

I tire of the living and the dead
and those between the two
and think I'd only stay if it was me and you
alone on the surface of a knowing sea
adrift forever through eternity.