The Lost Days of a Limpet

By queen beatle

Thu, 21 Jan 2021
  • 332 reads
2 comments
 

You were born a silent egg

A stubborn little shell

Sucking tight the window to the world.

Now, in nests of newspaper

And seconds ticking through the dust,

You hide and grind your teeth.

 

Posture like a sack of sand

Your face, a creaking door,

Adds to breezes brown as moths' fur

The fat of your sighs

As they shift around the house

In clouds more warm than loud.

 

The evening stink of gutted fish

Announces your familiar, the gull

Whose rigid bill and crabby legs

If you still had eyes to see them

Would remind you of all those lost days

You pecked at on the shore.

Certificate PG
Poem
my poems
Philosophy
Nature
Miscellaneous

Comments

Submitted by Tom Brown on

You said you have graduated since with a master's degree Morwenna, was it in languages? At the time you started writing on ABC you were still in high school I remember you were preparing for A-level exams. You progressed very fast no wonder you didn't have time for your own writing too.

Have you any plans for other/further study such as a PhD perhaps, or something completely new? Are you working? You were also very good at music. And what about the film making/study aspirations?

Keep well! Tom

PS. I was just a kid when I started angling and this is a brilliant description, I learnt from the start already to clean the fish after a day at the water, “The evening stink of gutted fish”. These days they chuck them back into the water seems a shame. It's called catch and release.

A couch potato “posture like a sack of sand” and “The fat of your sighs as they shift around the house in clouds more warm than loud" - sounds very familiar!

 

Submitted by queen beatle on

Hi Tom! Hope you're keeping well.

Yes, it must be about ten years since I started posting on here! I did a BA in English Lit in the end, then an MA in archive studies. At the moment I'm a freelance proofreader and work part-time in a cinema, but hoping to transition to proofreading full-time at some point. I'm considering another MA in English, but who knows - my goal is to just continue with proofreading, so any extra education would be more for fun than anything else.

Glad you liked the poem! The dead dogfish that wash up along the shore here are always particularly pungent.