Have been rummaging through last year's poetry bag to see what never hit the light of day... Here's one from early July. K xx

THE SEAL


The heart is an unarmoured mollusc,
a fleshy sticky-bud, moist with life.

Vibrant, it sends out its electrifying sensors
to swim in darting packs, trawling deep waters
of unseen unknown, gathering quicksilver reflections,
finding freedoms in warm currents of liberating truths:
It shoals.

Looming-shadow predators darkly emerge
with cavernous, nerve-crunching jaws and
flesh-shredding teeth, causing heart’s feelers
to withdraw, to conceal itself behind
spiny-coated barricades, snailing up inside.

This then the shell, the hell
where threatening dangers – phantom or real –
enforce a solitary incarceration;
under heavily-guarded sentence,
heart’s colour drains, its life leeched
like clean-picked bone.

Healing comes when,
with diver’s light descending,
it prises away all barnacled pain
and liberates the pearl of teardrops within.

Love to love adheres, a silky-stockinged
chainmail that coats the heart afresh,
a sheath of softened wax that only
each to other melts and tentatively opens:

The Seal.

So vulnerable, the heart,
and awkward when beached and bleached;

so gracefully saturated-heavy
when swimming in its element
of love’s many tumbling waters.