Stillness
It was just
as you’d imagined it.
Kittywakes, murres, even puffins swam
through the air with flashing wings,
white swoops spreading
like a summer storm
or a comet, each
bright and bold against
your dark sky mind
singeing the rocks with their
shooting star calls
and you remembered
why it was
that you came
looking
for something lost, or perhaps
just hidden
between the new chicks that sat
on the shit-stained
rocks
and what you hadn’t yet dreamed of
something far louder
than this urgency
burning, turning and tearing sky
with feathers
but then
perhaps you
dropped
or were dropped
as if it claimed you —
the stillness, not
the sea,
but like it —
and in it glimpsed
something you could not
ever
have imagined
but knew it
as freedom
within the hush
a waking, tethered only
by the imagining.
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