Holme II
Some day I’ll walk out past the salt marshes
To the margins, where skies glance the sea flats;
Foot heavy through the lay-mire,
My body will conform more closely
To the curving of the earth,
And stars will hang like the paper lanterns
We strung in the garden that summer,
Their constellations charting my course
Into the shelving waters.
This is a crossing place.
In the spring the wheatears will come,
And autumn thrushes
Will swarm the buckthorn berries.
Shards of pottery and bone
Still swell from the wetlands.
Story goes, they left their offerings here,
Wrists bound with marsh grasses,
Staked at the edge of the earth,
To feel the dark tidal drag
Of sleech-rise hungry against skin.
Julian Aiken lives in Connecticut USA, where he works as a librarian at the Yale Law School.
Originally from the UK, he has published work in three British poetry anthologies, a couple of
US literary reviews, and an alarming number of law library journals.
