These are three poems recited by a stowaway (a lost girl) to a visiting rat in the fifth book of the six novel WistThistle Cycle. After reciting each poem, she asks the rat: “Do you like it?” I had planned to be done with the fifth book by now, The Silent Sea, but summer intervened. I was also talked into writing Murderbot fanfiction. Just finished that—a Murderbot novella the same length as Wells’s novellas. I’ve probably written close to 200,000 words since the beginning of the year, which is why my poor blog has suffered neglect. But I thought I could share the three poems which the character Sihta recites to the rat, who really was only interested in her hardtack. The first is blank verse, the second is 6,8 hymn meter, the third is in the manner of Anglo Saxon alliterative verse. They’re a bit like three variations.
I
The chapters of the sea, the consummate waters,
The toil of a thousand years that turns
The stone to grains of sand, that whispers over
And over, this is what becomes of land
And this the heart does to the bone with sorrow
And love, the tide of blood, until no more
Than here or there a shell is washed to shore,
Made hollow, scored, and beautiful to hold.
II
hers are the salt-rimed lips
and hers the cloak bestrewn with bone;
hers are the rocking hips
that break the sea over the stone.
the moon her tambourine,
the stars her constellated hands,
her dancing goes unseen
among the waves that drum the sands.
she wears a cloth of mists,
and cries the cry of gulls—a witch
with coral round her wrists,
seamstress of the ocean’s seamless stitch.
III
the discourse of the sea—
the singing waves;
that though we wander
beyond her water’s throw
she whispers in the grasses
of the green tide’s sway
of the whale’s wide eye
in the wandering moon;
she spills in meadows
the spindrift stars
and lays at our thresholds
the late fall’s chestnuts;
the hickory and beech—
a wash of shells,
the cracked and dry leaves
in drifts of snow.
we ought to know
who’s offered them come winter.
who has not heard
in hollow and mountaintop
the ocean’s surge
sighing in the trees?
the heave of the sea
in the heart’s own beating?
IV
Do you like it?
