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Rebecca Jan 2019
The ocean, consume me.
I hear your call to me like a mother cow to her calf,
A low drawling echo that grows with the hour.
Or the calf to its mother,
you call me home
to suckle on my breast where in it my heart beats.
Drum, drum.
Be still the drums.
Laying deep in dark abyss.
The drums, the drums.
I smell the salty air
It haunts my passage, staining my dress
with crusted, crystallised foam.
Will this heart ne'er be clean?
To be filthied by shame, now unworthy to him
by the sea and what it has done to me.
I wait for you.
You growing pains, you. You wisdom teeth pushing through.
The dust settles in my candle light.
The little white flecks fall together like prancing dandelion seeds
as fragile as children who have been wasted in your hands like white gold,
thrown away.
What they could have been had they fallen to my hands.
Rosey and blue-eyed with marjoram soft hair.
So I wait, breath now freezing with the in and out
steadying as the tide rises.
It calls me to consume me.
Dare I step to it? Submerse my feet within the waves.
One more hour, one more day - tick, tock, tick, tock.
But what if this hour he comes my way?
Descending from heaven, knocking at my gate.
The crash of the ocean against my hull.
Wait, wait, for my life and forever, I will wait.
The ocean, consume me.
A response to Sir John Everett Millais's 1851 painting 'Mariana', Inspired by Alfred Tennyson's 1830 poem 'Mariana' "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!"
Rebecca Nov 2018
We are afraid that there is nothing.
We are afraid that there is something beyond, even we cannot know it and so squash it into a box.
We are afraid that cats will scratch out our eyes and someone will release a wild fox into the house letting it scream intensely like the sound of torture.
We are afraid of the deep, dark ocean, that it will eat us whole and a megalodon will slow motion leap from the deep to swallow us in totality and to be followed by a ship wrecking kraken that will cover an island and make us pay for our sins.
We are afraid of God, that he is mad, that he is angry, that he does not approve, that he isn't really there, that he doesn't have a plan for us, that he gave up on us and our disgusting lives and terrible choices that bring ultimate self-destruction.
We are afraid of spiders.
We are afraid of the house setting alight whilst nobody is home and the neighbours hate us so much they stand in their front gardens and watch it burn and only then calling the fire brigade when ash starts to affect their own space, their own environment, and they'll complain till the cows come home about "what an inconvenience all this has been", how it has made them late, how the fire engine has blocked off the road so Saturday shopping will have to wait a bit longer. And they hate us, they hate us, they hate us.
Their dog ***** in our garden. It ***** on our grave.
Luke Kennard, a brilliant poet and lecturer on creative writing, was a guest speaker in my class today. We were asked to write a poem inspired by Jennifer Knox's "We are afraid" and list our fears but make them deeply personal, unique and honest with a continuous flow. Focusing on Shakespeare's Fool character and how they reveal universal and personal truths, often to unpopular opinion or embarrassment.
Rebecca Nov 2018
When I die, I hope it is like my dreams.
In that way, death would not be so fearful,
A remedy for my thoughts when I sleep.
In return, I dream of my death by this
Stuff that so haunts my dreams. To be scorns of
Time and its aching length, calamity
Of so long life. Yet we so dread something
After death, a no-mans land from where no
One shall return – this makes us bear our ills.
We fight. We suffer. We are wounded, all.
So we are cowards that do fear our deaths,
For we fear the unknown, those we know not.
Instead we dream that dying is dreaming,
To sooth our conscience and minds from unreeling.
After a close reading of Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be', I chose elements of it to base this sonnet on as a response and a helpful tool to understand part of its meaning a little better.

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