Beached In Wales

April 17, 2018

I
A beached whale
The saddest sight
a way we feel.
On a beach in Wales
this sunken boat
not driftwood but
a skeleton
weighed down, splintered by sea and sand
the weight of history

2
Two years have past and
My beached whale of a splintered ship
has sunk beneath the sand
Left not a rack behind.

I prefer to think it was swept out to sea
sailed West to the land where the sun never sets
And the buffalo roam free.
Massacres never happened
Its flag signalled joy not conquest
Bouncing over waves, waving –
The stuff which dreams are made on
Fairytales of a different future
On a beach, in Wales
The past sleeps deep below the shabby sand

And then, the sun leaps out
The sand flashes silver and I find it,
further along than I’d thought,
Sunk a little lower than before but
still held by the sticky swamp
Intact, a testament.
It endures

3
Later I find that my magic ship is real
Not a myth of my making.
I’m not the first to see
her black teeth cutting through the mud.
The Sarah, she carried coal across the bay,
Anthracite.
Sounds like a jewel from the East
Not a fuel buried here in the West.
My ship will be a fossil soon, fossil fuel,
Never to be mined again.