Poetry Thursday - Poems on the Underground

Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide

Thrift grows tenacious at the tide's reach.
What is that reach when the water
is rising, rising?

Our melting, shifting, liquid world won't wait
for manifesto or mandate, each
warning a reckoning.

Ice in our gin or vodka chirrups and squeaks
dissolving in the hot, still air
of talking, talking.

Maura Dooley


From the Poetry Society website:

A new set of five poems goes live on London tubes on 1 July 2019 for four weeks. The poems all explore the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Some deal specifically with the urgent issue of climate change. Others reflect more generally on the ways in which human beings take solace and meaning from their living world of earth, sea and sky. 

The poems Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide by Maura Dooley‘Our melting, shifting, liquid world won’t wait / for manifesto or mandate…’
The Meaning of Existence by the late Australian poet Les Murray“Everything except language / knows the meaning of existence. / Trees, planets, rivers, time / know nothing else…”
I Am the Song by Charles Causley‘I am the song that sings the bird. / I am the leaf that grows the land. …I am the clay that shapes the hand. / I am the word that speaks the man.’
The shaft by Helen Dunmore‘Who would have thought that pain / And weakness had such gifts / Hidden in their rough hearts?’
‘My life closed twice before its close’ by Emily DickinsonTo the reader who suspects that the ‘events’ mentioned refer to abortive love affairs, the poem may not seem quite so gnomic. 

Poems on the Underground is supported by Transport for London, The British Council and Arts Council England.  Poems are selected by the writer Judith Chernaik and poets Imtiaz Dharker and George Szirtes.