A Poem a Day (719): Sea claws

 
A prompt from napowrimo.net: “I challenge you to find a news article and write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article. You can repeat them, splice them and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be just the facts, your poem doesn’t have to be.”
 
Here’s draft 2 of my poem and the spliced version follows underneath.

 
Sea claws
 
Choose an article & splice it,
redo, refit, the prompt said,
so I hunted for a happy one, devoid
of war & fighting, death, hate
& suffering. It took a while.
 
So here we are with lobsters,
those snippy little fellows with claws,
a crusher & a cutter, aqua-true
with beady black eyes.
 
Homarus Gammarus, to be posh,
or European lobster to me & you,
paddling the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
In calm waters around St Michael’s Mount,
baby lobsters indulged in their first swim,
all 1,088 of them, ten weeks old
& just an inch long.
 
You’ll need to check a map
as to its whereabouts,
but it’s pretty famous,
so you can probably picture it.
 
It was the end of a challenge
to do 25 releases in 25 locations,
a happy 25th anniversary
to the National Lobster Hatchery.
5,000 little snappers in all.
 
A female lobster can carry 20,000 eggs
in her belly, but only one is expected to survive
out there in the wild.
 
Released from a little plastic tube
they dive down, limbs flaying, scuttling,
to settle on the seabed & burrow
deep into spongy sediment
to spend a year learning how to live
in the bounteous sea.
 
You can even adopt one.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

 
 
Sea claws (the spliced version)
 
Happy devoid,
no war, no suffering,
a shakeup into cuteness.
It took a while.
 
With crusher & cutter,
snippy & aqua-true,
Homarus Gammarus paddles
the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
Ten weeks old
& just an inch,
baby lobsters begin
their maiden voyage.
1,088 tiny clappers floating free.
 
A dive down, scuttle
& burrow deep into the sea floor.
They’ll spend a year here,
learning how to live.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (718): The circle

 
The circle
 
There is a reason
bereft of season
extinct of leaves
that survives emotion,
a release to savour
beyond endeavour
the world’s compassion
amid pure elation,
to seek to celebrate
outside the obstinate
all the indelicate,
afraid to waken it.

Beneath this starlight
jibes another trick
that licked the night,
the way it burned so bright.

We stand still in time
outside of every rhyme,
every turn in the sky
seeking truth, not lie,
fierce oceans ironing out
beyond any doubt
this desire to speak
when you feel so meek,
a vowel left unsaid,
a need unfed.

So we caress water,
defend with laughter,
stand still, naked,
always so eternally naked.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (717): Crossing water

 
Crossing water
 
We gaze into the ears of seashells,
listen for the soft surf of water’s flow,
the truth of all our destinations,
a lover waiting in the wings,
this always-in-the-ether maybe.
 
We dance on beaches we once drew,
recite conversations we never wrote,
seek recalled waves from all our yesterdays
and watch the sun set into a sleeping sea.
And somehow we are encouraged
 
to walk on, to swim, crash, rise or fall.
So here we are, not so small after all.
We are the waking and the being,
and the rush of something else
we can never get a handle on,
 
but here we are in our looking glass,
reflected in flittering black obsidian,
wondering who stares back at us,
clerical, whimsical, ephemeral,
and we are reborn without even wishing it.
 
Distance is a subtle turn of the page
or a deep dive through a kaleidoscope
of shiftless shapes we cannot even see
until here we stand at the all too familiar
crossroads, seeing only as far as we are allowed,
 
burrowing against our every restriction,
throwing caution to the delight of our heart.
We are the divided outside of division.
We are the wonder that we ever spent this long
drifting.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (716): Exit right

 
Exit right
 
Where she is
she drifts like water flows,
a warm abyss, your welcome
into sweltering rain.
Pure rush, this downpour,
an effervescent everything.
 
And when she subsides
you’ll feel it
in the silences,
the emptied out,
the spaces she’ll leave behind
in the walkout, the exit,
the surrender outside of herself
just to be her.
 
To be the person who lived
before you,
before the accusations,
the dance, the pretence,
the other women you couldn’t ignore,
the criticisms, the putdowns
cos she could never be enough
for you.
 
But she didn’t need to be.
That’s the kicker,
the punch,
your realisation. So,
you’re gonna have to forgive her
cos it was you that wasn’t enough.
She walked through the blizzard
and she kept going.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025