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The Boat Made of Poems
sings and hums and talks and whispers to itself.
              It never sleeps.
It groans, it shudders to the rhythm of the waves.
              Its timbers creak
in the language of every port it has put into –
              the backchat, the patois,
the babble, the Babel, the smuggled rich lingo
              of each dockside bar.
But hush: don’t tell the captain or the bosun
              or the loosely rhyming crew:
                      there’s really nothing to it, poetry,
just air, hot air and paper, oh, and skill
              and love and hope, between them
                           and the deep dark silent sea. 

Editor's Note: The poem forms part of the sequence “Dreams of an Inland Lighthouse-keeper”. Published with kind permission of the author and Salt Publishing.