The silver net

Chapter 5: ‘AND THERE WAS NO MORE SEA’

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About This Book

A sequence of lyrical meditations that shifts between dreamlike visions, confessional solitude, and mythic or biblical reverie. Recurring images of sea and shipwreck, roses and gardens, and masked or legendary figures are used to probe longing, shame, desire, and the hope for spiritual renewal. Poems alternate between dramatic monologue, fable-like sketches, and brief nocturnes, exploring the tensions between illusion and revelation, life and death, and love as both ensnaring and ennobling, producing a compact, contemplative cycle of symbolist-inflected verse.

‘AND THERE WAS NO MORE SEA’

Revelation, xxi. 1.

The white-crested wave swirls by in the night

With many a shriek and a moan!

’Tis the soul of a thief in its whirlpool plight—

Not water, but flesh and bone.

And this soul is torn and rent by the reef,

And the frantic waves they fight

For the milk-white blood this soul of a thief

Sheds on the rocks each night.

And sinners laugh at the pangs and doles

Foretold in Holy Writ,

But the beautiful waves are dead men’s souls

And the sea is the bottomless pit.