What the Sea Remembers
by Felicity Plunkett
Haul and wail of sea-birds
who make it their mirror and bowl
Rough lines that disclose
its crawl into land, its hold
Discarded things, repository
of the lost and wave-tossed, shellf-
racture, plastic, atlas
of breakage, axis
trashed and washed. Lost
plants, rootless and torn
laid out to curate, forlorn, and if
there are tears here, call them salt
The sea remembers. Its roar
is dies irem. White flat moan and call
of trauma, of recall. Froth
and spit of weeping. Trace
of all forgetting would erase.
Relics of a life, however brief.
In its vast archive my grief
is a small file. The sea has cradled
bodies, undone them, organ
by organ: the sea dead, the lost
to earth. Never buried. The sea
stamps its name on all you set free.
Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, critic and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Vanishing Point (UQP) and Seastrands (Vagabond Press) and the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP). She is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press.