Your Sea


You’d say this grass is a slab of light green sea
and the myriad white flowers scattered through it
the tips of waves whipped up by the wind, or
it might have snowed with these flowers, most
of which have now melted
on a warm, grassy bed.

These are your modes, in which varieties are crystallised
into drops of perception.
My poems
begin as surrealist mess, you say,
which my conscious mind refines into sense.

It’s your world talk. We are specks
of pollen floating;
your poems trace the outline of two at the moment
of their collision (and
their gentle parting
is the closing
of the poem’s mouth).

You weave webs
of wispy glass, thin fingers
of light set against backdrops of heavier
material clusters: what
we all see
but never speak.

This poem, then, is a return
to the sight of the already spoken.

Stuart Cooke

Stuart Cooke’s latest chapbook, Departure into Cloud, was published by Vagabond Press in 2013. His full-length collection is Edge Music (IP, 2011). He is a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University on the Gold Coast.

More by Stuart Cooke ›

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.


Related articles & Essays