Saint Senara and Me

We’re floating away in a barrel,

Princess Senara and me.

The malevolent King packed us in,

hurled us into the Celtic sea.

Selkies sing to us, porpoises guide us,

kittiwakes point the way.

Senara rows with her strong arms

and feeds me turtle tea.

She reads the stars, she whispers to waves,

she calms their swell and gyre.

She keeps me warm in her long red hair

tangled with langoustines.

We pitch and roll, I swallow the rain,

our barrel fills with minnows.

Senara grows gills and a silvery tail,

she swims us into tomorrow.

The Bay of Biscay is far away,

my toes touch shingle and shale.

I crawl onto the sand of this tin-rich land,

saved by my mermaid mother.

Anna Kisby

The Winds of Fate

One ship drives east and another drives west

With the selfsame winds that blow.

’Tis the set of the sails

And not of the gales

Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate,

As we voyage along through life;

’Tis the set of a soul

That decides its goal,

And not the calm or the strife.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Boats in a Storm

In response to Bakhuizen

ART UK Film

Look.

How does a painting capture

stillness in chaos?

Is it through the narrow range of grey

the refusal to smudge edges?

Or is it that in the wild but contrived waves

of a painted storm belongs our true future?

Frothy, merciless, cold –

we are seized.

There sit 287 people in Parliament

who’d replace humanity’s complexity

with clear and simplified blocks of colour,

make children the distant background of a painting,

matt polish pushing salvageable suffering from sight.

They would have us nod in front of oil on canvas,

I agree, it’s an extraordinary depiction

of a terrifying moment.

Applaud us to retreat into a disorder without detail,

the patient artifice of babels

bodies that are hardboiled,

awaiting the peeling.

Look.

A sun and steeple in the distance –

does the artist suggest we can be saved

from cauldron clouds and augmented oceans?

I think that will require more than sun and steeples,

more than ropes flung to shore,

More than sculptured outlines of what is ‘right’.

It will require, simply, all of the people

to steady our boats in a storm.

Sabrina Mahfouz

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’