Mer de Ballade
I’ve been keeping a jar of seawater on my desk.
There’s a tragedy in keeping a wild thing captive.
In the morning, I see the salt-rim footsteps
Of a retreating tide, frozen like a mausoleum.
Our bodies are two thirds water.
The brain, more teardrop than flesh.
The same stream that flows throughout you,
Flowed through the earliest lifeforms.
We think in cycles. The laconic pattern of tides.
The process by which chalk becomes bone
becomes sand, becomes unbecoming.
I’ve seen the voice of God in a storm cloud.
Water is said to have a memory,
Which makes sea shanties impotent at best
And baptism a form of torture; it knows your sins.
I wouldn’t ask it to forgive you so readily.
The murder ballad is a song of death.
It’s not hard to hear the departed in the water;
We all end up floating down the river Styx
And all rivers lead to the sea.
I was four when I first saw death en masse;
A shoreline gibbet of dogfish, the ritual dance of seagulls.
I answer the tidal thrum, take my pet back to its home
And wade out in the afterdark surf.
The freight ships twinkle brighter than the stars. I watch
Waves that tear the horizon like newspaper print,
Hold the open jar under the surface, until the bubbles stops
And walk back, spending Charon’s fare in 2p machines…
Connor Sansby is a Poet, Author, Festival Producer and Editor-in-Chief for Whisky & Beards Publishing. He has performed across the UK. He is currently writing his second collection, an autoethnography about growing up by the sea.