Structure
This map
demarcates zones, tidal, industrial, leisure,
a filigree of roads spilling arterially
to a baby-blue sea, and here, the spine of hills
softly shaded like the print of a leaf…
The place
stands proud in its exoskeleton of scaffolding;
cranes anglepoise in air, glass gridlocks sky
- a monument to work and gravity in
column, cantilever and cross…
One woman
sits in the hug of the bay, near roads
directing where she may and may not go,
her mind a forest of plans and times,
of dreams and signs…
Within her
cells divide to a family blueprint;
her unborn son, ghostly spiralling of
likeness through ancestral lines,
waits in amniotic poise…
Around
spores dance in air, a bird snoops low,
a seed mines a hairline crack in stone,
the moon rakes the sea, planets glow,
weather makes the gorse burn and grow.
© Jacqueline Mézec
(This poem was commissioned in 2003 for the 2nd edition of the magazine fath-om)