Containers
From on this cliff top, I can clearly see
the quarter-mile-long ship across the bay,
a dark shape of unseen complexity.
I am a sack of bags, with tubes that go
between them, and with fine wires everywhere.
I am the mind that feels this to be so.
It’s a box filled with boxes, piled twelve high,
some twenty thousand of them, each packed through
with its own thousand boxes, soon to be
opened by those of us who have to buy
the stuff we crave to take our pain away.
I stretch an aching arm and find it’s true,
the ship is small enough to disappear
behind the thumb I raise up to the sea.
Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines. His collections are This Patter of Traces (Oversteps Books, 2014), Mapping (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2018) and Mollusc (The High Window Press, 2021)