Mare Nostrum (Song of the Mediterranean)

have I not the aeons...

to map ruptures in the lithosphere - 

 

to quell mighty seaquakes -

to behold belts of primordial crust - 

tossed across the heavens 

 

have I not the plasticity...

to caress the glacial fleece 

that varnished my tides 

 

so long ago -

with brackish frost 

 

have I not the estuaries...

to trace the incinerating slipstreams of magma -

that hissed down the continental margin

like boiling, Palaeozoic tears

 

*

 

have I not the hydrodynamics...

to plow through the undercurrents

alongside the ichthyosaurs - below the soaring pterodactyl 

to speed beneath the keel of Forth Dynasty barges - 

 

to seize the midday sun

ablaze above the Acropolis -

casting brief, obsidian galaxies 

 

upon the absinthe surface of Aegean inlets 

 

*

 

have I not the trepidation...

to drink the splinters of shattered triremes -

to float through the thick billow of torn bodies

 

Ionian, Phoenician, Spartan, and Roman -

to drive the starless engine

of their capsized flight 

 

to employ the storm in its black business

of buckling cedar and twisting hulls -

 

to wreck so many galleons and frigates -

haemorrhaging lace, rum, gunpowder, ducats and myrrh 

into the seagrass meadows of my deep 

 

*

 

have I not the discountenance...

to shutter in the echo of Lord Nelson’s canon

Wilhelm II’s torpedos

or Sadat's MiG-21’s

roaring over Libya 

 

have I not the compass

to memorise every single rivet, bolt and bone

of the brigs, cruisers, destroyers and skiffs

I have wholeheartedly devoured

 

*

 

and yet -

have I not - perchance in an unremembered corner 

 

of a coastal shrine -

some measure of sanctity...

 

to lament the last gasp of the drowning refugee

 

to acquit the death-wail of the hunted sea beast

 

to bare witness to so many dreams

at the very moment of their annihilation 

 

to be the laureate of these dislocated eulogies 

 

and the unsparing-protectress

of their muck-caked

polypropylene cemeteries