of lighthouses & dock lights

by Sarah Wallis

after The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Centenary Year 

As if having the dock light at all 

didn’t speak of greenbacks, and hope, 

peace, no, not peace – 

and he was diminished by hope, for it gave 

him no peace, he stared at that green light 

in the dark so long... 

and once he thought he had her, his Daisy, 

the green light lost its great emblem 

of meaning – that had once meant everything 

to him – in his former hopes, his dreams,

of course, lived 

the beginning of his end.  

A lighthouse is denoted by colour 

and seconds count of flashes, known as 

the Characteristic, it is how sailors tell

which one guides them now, sees them safe 

through the dark and onto 

the next one, and so on, until morning 

or harbour retrieve them. Fewer lighthouses 

flash green, because the colour speaks 

to safe water, there is less need, more hope. 

But there was to be no safe harbour for Gatsby

that lived so long on his hopes, he had only 

an electric green glare, a steady, radial 

warning, as if the dock light were 

a glowing timepiece, throwing out a dare, well, 

he had dared, eventually, old sport, he had, 

and lost more than his countless beautiful shirts. 

Sarah Wallis lives by the sea not far from Edinburgh and has a chapbook out with Boats Against the Current, Poet Seabird Island. Publications this year include Frazzled Lit, The Interpreter’s House, Paperboats and Punk Dust, who will publish her Modern Sonnets After the Circus. In exciting news she has been granted a UNESCO Fellowship and a writing residency at Skara Library in Sweden to deliver workshops and work on her next collection.