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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

The letter


This coconut-white, sea view room,
its balcony doors flung wide and filled
with the sound of surf, is a vacuum
of thought my soul savours till the moon
brings the quiet, low-tide and night-chilled.
On the bed your letter flutters, re-sealed
by the weight of a wave-smoothed pebble
plucked out of the day as a Jurassic fossil.

The part where you refuse to be my wife,
I can't hear you in it, I can't hear your voice;
your words like a shell once contained life
but now like a shell are empty with noise.
Retreating here was the obvious choice
to drown it out in a tempest of waves
that can claim a man, or have him raised
out of the undertow he thinks he craves.

The sea, the sea: an oasis from the need
to perceive - in murky depths - an oasis
in the eye of another. From that I'm freed.
I comb the day beach and at night get pissed
on the heated patio of the harbour bar,
each mast-light in the bay a bobbing star,
and teeter up to this coconut-white room
quiet and grey under the waiting moon.