Poems

Chapter 69: Inland

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About This Book

This collection gathers lyrical poems that move between expansive meditations and concentrated sonnets, exploring awe, longing, and the burdens of compassion. Recurring subjects include nature, seasonal change, mortality, and desire, with vivid images of orchards, sea, and city life anchoring philosophical reflection. The volume alternates long narrative-lyric pieces with brief, tightly crafted songs and sonnets, shifting from exuberant, declarative lines to quiet elegiac tones. Organized in sections that vary in mood and form, the work emphasizes emotional immediacy, formal variety, and an attentive speaker negotiating self, other, and the natural world.

Inland

People that build their houses inland,
People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
Far from the sea-board, far from the sound

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
Tons of water striking the shore,—
What do they long for, as I long for
One salt smell of the sea once more?

People the waves have not awakened,
Spanking the boats at the harbour’s head,
What do they long for, as I long for,—
Starting up in my inland bed,

Beating the narrow walls, and finding
Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning,—
One salt taste of the sea once more?