[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Honoured among foxes that thieve in heaven
I stole images, breeding the absurd,
creating contradictions with a pen.
There, my nib would hold a blooded word,
ungentled and hungry to hunt again.

The sudden gulls were crowded loud in screams,
over sea-wrack crackling on the stone,
there shadows shied into a warping eye,
a gibbous moon, its pearling of green bone,
cupped gently in a deep and velvet sky.

Across the strait the past is yet to fall.
High on the ragged bone of histories
an upright figure calls above the deep.
Old words cast out on dark and hungry seas
that eat the shore and leave the rock to weep.

I walked easy where the cold water preyed
along the priested shores and mussel muse.
There, a sea-wet church on ocean mud
caught the morning sun with its burning news
and lit the broken cross and fallen blood.

A clump of lime-washed clom and rubble stone,
the fishing village, eyes blind to windward
slow-spill their morning men into the dawn.
The trawlers rise, the tide is on the flood
and dreams of living-silver hauls are born.