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Lesley Harrison

Saint Cuthbert (c. 634 – 687) spent his last years in seclusion in a cell on the Northumbrian island of Inner Farne.

i.
morning.
a cloud lifts, the island resolving
in a turn of ocean

the sparkling clink of waves on sand
sound, a living matter
sound illumined

a wave swallowing a rock pool,
the gulls, their sharp words
repeated and repeated

the god of my childhood
in the grey white sea noise
in the screech of seabirds.


ii.
Spring tide.
I walk into the sea's cold bloom,
its heft, its anonymity.

I trace my entire belief
in the viscera of salt and wind,
the natural fall of cloud.

here is only everything:
the secular ocean,
the crush and crush of new waves;

its motion brings peace,
the beach, its privacy and darkness
a relief from psalmody.


iii.
a round hull
knocking into hollows

the eider,
their broody pots of down

this bright space,
its salutary emptiness.


iv.
a stone cell
hunkered on a rock.
quiet vacancy.


v.
gathering
in the green light of dawn

eider croon in the
hollows between waves

their white defined by
the darkness of the water

conscious points
in this inexhaustible space.


vi.
to dwell outside myself,
to live in the lived world
among snails and grasses

in ordinary daylight
growing old, neither man nor woman
fasting in silence.


vii.
the dune slacks. beds of neat helleborine
watercress and elder.
the milk vetch, tight lipped.


viii.
otters pry in bedrock
puddling the sand, then vanishing completely
in the heavy green.

I love the disappearance —
the free power of waves,
the world that ends at the surface

the presences of stars in daylight.
the thin white moon.
the gannets, their slow ovation.
from the book DISAPPEARANCE: NORTH SEA POEMS / Shearsman Books
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Head shots of, clockwise from top left, Aria Aber, Diannely Antigua, Jake Skeets and Genya Turovskaya
2020 Whiting Award Winners

Aria Aber, Diannely Antigua, Jake Skeets, and Genya Turovskaya are the recipients of this year's Whiting Awards for poetry. The awards recognize emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, who show early accomplishment, and "the promise of great work to come." 
 
via THE PARIS REVIEW
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"In a 1987 interview that appeared in the Partisan Review, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said, 'It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.' With that metaphor, we are asked to see poetry as a gauge, a measure, a tool, a way of understanding the nature of phenomenon.”
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