A poem for Sunday

I apologise to actual poets reading this post, because I am not one. I’m in a silly mood today, and so I wrote this silly ‘poem’. (Is it a poem? Who knows.)

Luckily, this blog is my kingdom, so I can publish amateurish attempts with abandon. Enjoy, or don’t enjoy:

I am collecting seas,
we all collect them
we all stare at them with longing,
waiting for the profound.

We reach for them
like reaching for the rain.
Plath wrote, they said,
there are too many poems about rain.

There are too many poems about the sea.

I am collecting seas,
some of them are old water.

There are the waves that began with
“Seas are homesickness for homes we never had”
and then the piano agrees.

Childhood songs of the sea
written for lost adults
lamenting the shells
like us sad humans.
We cry. We luxuriate in this.

I am collecting seas,
there’s the silver baptismal water
of this bleached Australian book
winking at me in familiarity and unfamiliarity.
There’s the blue that is too blue
and so, unnameable.

We write ten thousand words
on how we cannot write about it,
and words are strange.

I am collecting seas,
the alien ones with the orange thighs
parted to the sand with colours
glistening like the backs of lizards to the sun.
Yellow upon yellow,
flesh not quite meeting the liquid.

I am collecting seas,
waiting for the profound, childish, too young.
I receive the absurd, the loveable,
the not quite poetic
the too poetic for my words.

I am collecting words,
there are too many words about the seas.