The Med is a graveyard.

[JamesG]

I haven't posted, or indeed written anything, for a while, but this came to me unbidden today

All feedback welcome


The Med is a graveyard.



Crying underwater, salt mixes with the fresh,

an unholy alchemy, dissolving with the rest.

My body drifts

weighed down by the cloth I hold,

in my hands a funeral wreath,

a birthday suit, sodden, full of light.

The weeds, the sea-weeds

caress my puckered skin

they wrap me in their bladderwrack adoration

Gently flagellating, parting like the sad

Magician’s curtains, to reveal a host,

a flock of ragged tourists, floating just above the

grey, grey dance floor, dismal toes describing

arabesques through the silt of a thousand expeditions,

clasping their dreams to their chests like children.

Sometimes, just clasping,

their children.

Milk eyes stare in blank accusation

of my misremembered life

I never knew the sea, the sea

had so much hope and misery

buried deep down where

the salt and fresh collide.

Hi,

I'm sure someone more qualified than I will be along to give you a more informed critique, but in the meantime I have a few comments:

I don't get the salt mixing with fresh, or colliding, situation which seems to be crux of the poem. 

I've read the poem a few times and whilst it reads well, I think, I'm struggling with some of the detail. This body sinking into the sea is holding a funeral wreath and also, it seems, a cloth. I had assumed the body was enclosed in cloth, but the next few lines reject that impression - birthday suit, puckered skin.

The description of the seaweed and the sea floor with the tourist bodies is very effective.

I'm clearly too thick to grasp the meaning, but I hope some of this helps.

I doubt it has anything to do with your intelligence and more with my wilful obscurity :0)

The poem was inspired by a thought that came to me, as they do, of whether it is possible to cry underwater, and thinking about how salt tears would dissolve or dissipate in a greater body, like a river flowing into the ocean. However, I guess that would be the other way around, as that would be fresh water into salt. That then fed into my own thoughts surrounding the many migrants that have died, men, women, and children, crossing the Mediterranean in the hope of a new life, which I guess creates another reading of the metaphor for the salt and the fresh.