- Michelle
River in a dead sea bed
Today is World Ocean Day, so I thought I'd share a sea-inspired poem I've been working on. I'm still not sure if it's finished, but it feels as good a day as any to share it.
It started with a photo my mum sent me. My folks have recently moved further up north, to a flat overlooking the Wyre estuary. It's a vast landscape, as beautiful as it is bleak (on the not-so-sunny days). It's also scattered with shipwrecks near the dockside; vessels run aground, sloughing their skin and merging with the landscape as if they were always meant to be there.

Here's my mum's picture. To me it looks like a vast rib cage erupting from a grassy boneyard... Eventually I'd like to make a lino print inspired by this image, but for now I thought I'd write about it.
I'm still enjoying experimenting with AI as a writing prompt/partner at the mo. So, I scribbled a few sea-faring sentences inspired by the photo, fed these into Inferkit (AI text generator), and got a jumble of interesting responses. I took four random lines that I liked and these became the intro (and springboard) to my poem. I then fed the whole thing back into the text generator, and after a jumble more lines got an interesting title.
River in a dead sea bed
The smell of soap
goes with me to the sea
the moisture of your breath
on my eyelashes
the whisper of your name
a cold carapace
Thus am I pitched
tempered by your weightless echo
till the salt in the air
whips at my back
sucks at my hair
sea ants to the honeydew
No song can bring you to the shore
quite like a storm
the mad tangle of it
the smell of wet dog
where mosses now grow
in the tender, heavy stillness
of my peace
And the bones meant for you
now a house of splinters
wrested from a cyclone
and woven with brine
a relic, here
a rib cage yawning
They will read your words
in the skin of my fingers
taste the scent of you
in the fork of my hair
savage and probing
as a snake’s tongue.