Please visit Paul Brookes’ blog to see the gorgeous artwork that inspired this and the other poems today.

Nostalgia

Some things call to the past, to a nostalgia,
a loss. They call with majestic roaring
or small fish-mouthed silences,

oceans, regretful tears filling them full as fish,
a lonely barque drifting, only mysteries aboard,
wind-stripped blossom in a velvet eastern night.

We weep for what we have never known,
what we think we remember,
what we wish had been,

and the waves lap white and black stone
of cliff faces with their rough tongues rasped
like cats’, relentlessly, regretting nothing.