-Paul Brookes

The Ocean

Ocean
Always frightens me
It’s vastness
Takes my breath away
It’s seemingly endless depth
Hides the unknown
And that’s scares me the most
The inability to see
What’s coming
From the deep belly
Of the cold hell
On earth

-Carrie Anne Golden

watching the sea swell
with unfathomable depths
we talk of true love

#senryu Previously in A Hundred Gourds 3.1

-John Hawkhead

Fathoms

Deeper than the trawlers net
Fifty fathoms deeper yet
The crushing weight of oceans brine
Holds the secrets kept through time
Stabs of light from other world
Cannot reach the sails unfurled
Of sunken ships that lie beneath
Their guts torn out on rocks or reef
They rest in silence on the ocean bed
The haunting fifty fathoms deeper yet

-Graham Bibby
@gtmaddison

WHALE–WEND

Heart-ship tugs at its harbour.
My imagination in mere-flood,
in whale plunge, wide in its turns
eager for seas vastness. Gannet yells
as whale-wends, spirit quickens over holm’s deep,
irresistible delights of life are more
than this life that flits on land.
Illness, old age and aggression
wrests life away, bests breath.

-Paul Brookes (From “I’m Wave Rider”, a retelling of an anglo-saxon poem, featured in my collection “The Headpoke And Firewedding”)