Salema Moods: Three Short Poems

I. Ocean Pulse

Rising, curling, foam unfurling,
waves of cold Atlantic sea,

next one coming, meet it running,
plunge into the safe beneath.

Avoid crashing, hard sand-smashing
that could knock me to my knees.

Out here holding. Look I’m floating!
Blood-beat drumming in my ears.

Waves keep surging, endless burgeon
sent up from the darkest deeps,

surface playing, breath delaying,
I dive into your mystery,

always saying all to me.

II. Here is Where
I've been here
before but
now I’m here
for healing.

Twice times ill
with cancer
and its cure
here is where
I’ve come. Numb
beneath – or
should I say
beyond? – these,
my extremities.

I've been here
before but
now I’m here
for healing.

III. Seeing Eye

I’m rocked in salt arms: the ocean,
waves pillowing under my head.
The sky’s eye seems to wink open
to glint all I seek to reflect.
For one glittering, infinite instant
I can’t tell the fall from the swell.

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Tormentor Mentors

IN AUTUMN OF 1916, Iseult Gonne sent a long letter to her friend and mentor, WB Yeats, in which she referred to his recent critique of her writing: “I am most thankful to you for those criticisms you have made on my scribblings,” she wrote. “Yes, they are bad. I knew it all the while and I am glad of what you say about truth and beauty. I will try and put it into practice . . . but just now I am still too tired to work.”

Too tired to work. When I first came upon those words, as part of research I was doing into Gonne’s life, I felt like weeping. Yes, the writing she was doing at the time could sometimes be

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