Rough Sea

26/10/10

Rough Sea by Alison Prince

Alison Prince began her career in TV, writing scripts for BBC children's programmes including 'Joe' 'Jackanory' and 'Trumpton'. Her books include an adult novel, biographies of Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen and two volumes of poetry. She has won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and many other prizes, including the Literary Review Grand Poetry Prize, twice, and holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Leicester University for services to children's literature. Her next novel, No Ordinary Love Song will be published by Walker next year. 'Rough Sea' is taken from her collection Having Been in the City, Taranis Books, 1994.

Rough Sea

Old deaths are one with air and spray,
The taste of salt and the scattered sun
Glinting like fish scales
On the body of the sea.

The dead are everywhere.
They are the curled life in the gull's egg,
The rain, the leap of dolphin
Or the whale whose vast tarpaulin back
Gleams briefly through the wave.

The dead live on while anyone
Shifts to balance the sea's heave,
Watches its surge loom up,
Lean and swing under
While the next wave looms again.
The dead have known this wet skin
And the muscles' ache, the sense
Of where the still horizon lies
Beyond these sea-hills.

I am the dead.
There is no fear of fear
In this wild sea.
 

Alison Prince

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