Poems by Bex Hainsworth
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Ghosting
by Bex Hainsworth
Bex grew up beside the River Aire, which winds its way through the Yorkshire dales. She has since swapped these hills for the flatter, urban landscape of a Midlands city, but she still writes about her rural home.
An iceberg of green netting floats
in the open ocean. Unmelting, its ropes
sway like jellyfish tendrils, a forest
of hardened kelp. A swell lifts
the decaying veil, then drops it again,
a terrible shroud.
A spinner dolphin hangs
in suspended animation,
eyes black as mussels’ shells,
fins holding up knotted chains,
Marley’s ghost, snared harbinger.
The web reaches sandwards
to where it is anchored by lobster cages
piled like sunken aviaries, their yellow lichen
glinting with the hidden light of fool’s gold.
Abandoned crab traps are still making a catch,
set by long-dead fishermen whose boats rust in the bay.
Summoned by curiosity, they crawl over the coins of shells,
the burial ground of their brothers. A chorus of ghostly clacking
goes unheeded. They do not turn back.
A seal swirls through the blue murk,
considers an easy snack, but can sense a death
it does not bring, fears the noose, the macabre collage:
a turtle shell weighing down the gauze like a cannon ball,
a hammerhead who came to scavenge, but sprang the trap.
They are caught, collateral, an afterthought.
© Bex Hainsworth
Walrus
For Wally
by Bex Hainsworth
They say that you dozed off on an iceberg
and awoke on Irish shores, a Nordic visitor
without a horde, lonely wanderer, far
from your arctic home. Child of ice mountains,
you have ridden these Celtic currents
for months, travelling south, strange sun-pilgrim.
They say that you are lost, gorging yourself
on Cornish clams, preparing for a return journey,
but your continental visits are inscrutable.
Fingertip of Nuliayuk, you bask on beaches
like the discarded glove of an old god,
with your leathery hide, you are your own luggage.
Seafarer, you did not pack light for your odyssey.
Rolling in the snowflakes of the seafoam,
you nose boulders with grizzled whiskers,
snuggle into rocky crevices, coldsick, exiled,
missing the sounds and smells of the herd.
They say that you came to the harbour seeking company.
At night you bob among boats, mourning your lost brothers,
and watch the stars in a black sky, wishing for
a green, kelpy flicker of the aurora borealis.
Perhaps you are a scout from a melting world,
a tusked omen, disaster warning. Dear walrus
of wanderlust, moustachioed philosopher,
you are all of us, floating in an ocean-universe,
with no choice but to go on seeking.
© Bex Hainsworth