the sea did not
fill your soul with sand
but dry land’s rising stone and complication
laid an arid continent to the edges of distance
geology and heavy weather
by erosion silted bleak memory in you
like gravel grinding your resilience
wearing thin like a cheap suit
sea calmed you in the landslide days
covered you with its translucent green light
your eyes’ weeping in another wet.
land and landscape
brought you to a hollowness
where sprawling humanity’s affliction
was its own scuttling blindness
it was never the sea
that filled your soul with sand
but sand itself gritty and windblown
stinging like spitting biting rage
you swam until land was gone
along with the crowded cities
you swam until the aimless and artless streets
were lost among the waves
away now
that’s you away
going down uncounted
to where currents teased your soul
with sky and horizon forgotten everything
of air and cloud or rain forgotten
you had let too many
crowds surround you
until they shut out the light
of every good day’s dawning
a stroke too far
let the breakers take you
and keep you not set you free
to rise again having only swum until
the world was washed clean
by tide and deep water
© Brian Hill
Scott Hutchison mural unveiled in Glasgow
Frightened Rabbit - Swim Until You Cant See Land
Brian Hill. 50 years a poet. One-time designer and film-maker; long ago, the rhyme-slinger, cartoon cowboy, and planetarium poet; now feverishly stringing words together in the hope of making sense.
Brian blogs as Scumdadio (don’t ask).
