by Gerard Lewis-Fitzgerald

Saving one’s own is like
saving a chunk of yourself.

Son clambers to safety
while I cling to boogie-board,
a plaything now for Poseidon,
swept in a graceful arc,
buoyed like a cork,
a barnacle adrift,
shark fodder flotsam
now in a slow death-row
wave-march towards the
spume-drizzled bones of the cliff.

An unfathomable calm
swells warm inside me,
and invisible arms cushion my head
against a fatal blow.
My blubbering boy in awe
of the depth of the ocean’s mercy;
tightly now he clings to me
as I had done to his board.
Through his tears
my wounds bead red as rubies;
he loops me in the moorings of his lean arms
and we regard each other as treasure.

These days, he is the aloof sailor
of my hollowed-out heart,
plying exotic seas, trading in thriving ports,
always elsewhere – his stern vanishing
over the platinum horizon,
and a casual, whispering wake.

12 February, 2019