By Louise Green
after Edwin Muir
After the seven hundred years
that will put the world to sleep
let it be the turn of the seahorses
to drift through pale chambers
sculpted by thorny spines,
grazing on seeds of quartz, riding
the coral currents of the earth’s slow heart.
Let their sonic poems be its lullaby,
their tails lyres, fashioned to make music
from a tide drawn behind a darkling moon.
In place of heralds singing the first dawn,
only a lifting of their equine heads,
a stillness in the herd to mark the warmth
stirring an almost-barren deep.
And let there be light, to show the slow
undoing of darkness made by the lost,
two-legged race. May the seahorses come
without intention, no urge to help repeat
what came to be. This time around, no
heart-piercing servitude;
only the bright, clean pastures of the sea.
