On a wet September morning by Lenrie Peters

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On a wet September morning 

When vultures hate themselves

On the beach, against the flooded moorage

Along the rock shelves

Where sea-gulls lay their eggs. 

Half under the cracking waves 

With sea-weed under my nails 

Where the coastline bends. 

The sea was not the land's end.

The world under the sea 

The sea under the earth

The sky under the sea 

Were elemental changes of a world, 

As the true life is death 

Which is the idea inside us 

So distinction ends.

The plagued centuries 

In a weeping jelly-fish.

The pebble that will be a crown 

The moon reflected in a starfish.

My amputated feet 

Buried in soft sand 

Within the blue shadows 

Were already prehistoric. 

I tried to leap

Out of shark's way 

Far from the cutting teeth

Thundering like the wave 

Aimed at my vitals, not my feet

But they had planted roots 

Among the symbiosing weeds 

Which issued from my feet 

Under the caressing current 

Where disproportionate time

Lulled in deep sleep. 

I could not move; 

I say I could not move 

My vegetable feet, 

But still the tumbling jaws.

Only a silent yell

Rang through time's corridors

To the farthest end

Where the amoeba becomes

The fire, water and air.

Where the primeval fruit still hangs. 

So to the other end

Where plants are but continents

Deep in the future 

That is darker and older

Than the past.

The echo burst inside me 

Like a great harmonic chord-

Violins of love and happy voices

The pagan trumpet blast 

Swamping the lamentation of the horn

Then the heraldic drums 

In slow crescendo rising

Crashed through my senses 

Into a new present

Which is the future.

It was the music

Floating on salt air

Mixture of ozone and fish, urea

Boundless in all her forms. 

Like children's toys

Which lifted me

Higher than myself 

From the palsied hand of destruction

Came new awareness

In the new vibrations

And care born of feeling

Fear, and the pestilence of thought 

Was cradled in a wet pulsating stone.

How then the smell of fish 

The salted lips

Were like violets in a desert waste 

The rancid taste 

Her priceless treasury of gems

Hot burning sands,

Like the edentulous 

Sprouting palms.

The sea was the desert 

The wet was the dry

Here was there.

All indistinguishable 

Like the smell of

Old men's trousers 

From the Sunday joint.

Truth lay on the sea bed 

Black suffering on the land. 

The sun raised gently her head 

As I lay buried on the sand