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title
Issue # 7 May 2012
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Patrick Lodge is an Irish/Welsh poet currently living in Yorkshire. His work has appeared in many English, Welsh, Australian and New Zealand magazines and his poems have been anthologised three times. He was a prize winner in the 2009 Envoi International competition. He travels a great deal and his work often explores a sense of dislocation and otherness.


Patrick Lodge


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Liebling

i.m. Maria Kleeman who died October 14th 1887 on the emigrant ship "Solway"
off Kangaroo Island, South Australia and was buried on the 16th.

 

The funeral was, then, our first business here;
her corpse lowered cold into a barren point
known only to those sailors who, each year,
by fire and knife, reduced whales, joint by joint

to blubber, oil and meat; leaving bleached bone,
a vaulted church on a plain burial ground.
Her last dawn on earth, sun lit the unknown
beyond the bay, warming a soul unbound.

Her body not committed to open sea,
that brought her half a globe to this land;
waves offered no rest there for eternity –
a plain coffin bore her across the strand.

You are the first seed planted here; we sing
your inheritance - harvest come, liebling.