Each whorl is unique, mine alone,
whirlpools of joy, bubbling away.
No Charybdis to entrap you, drag you down
but circles of tenderness
where the sea forms and reforms, the surf singing,
embracing itself in patterns against your lips.
Some lines cut deep like ocean trenches
but there is no danger here, no sudden plunge
into the cold gut of the Atlantic, no abyss,
just signs I’m aging; longitudes of love,
unreadable symbols of a silent knowledge
the mermaids hoard and we both understand.
______________
Carolyn Thomas is Welsh but lives in retirement on Tyneside. Her poems can be found in
Dreich, These Pages Sing, Impossible Archetype, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Her stories appear in the Honno Press anthologies, Lipstick Eyebrows and Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, which includes her account of life as a gay woman in the 1970s.
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