sea

by Fiona Vigo Marshall

This sea is made of light, 

rolling heavy in and crashing

on the pebbles in the old way. 

And it’s as if it prays me:

Please send him back, 

and, I want to go home.

This chastens me; 

it’s not me praying.

It’s an involuntary surge, 

basic and automatic as this sea,

or my heart beating, 

that longs for itself. 

It’s not personal.

I’m past caring 

that my love were in my arms again,

that the small rain down can rain. 

It’s this liquid light

gathering itself and heaving 

with the sway of many moons,

many centuries, that wants things 

to go back

to being how they were before.

I have no say, in my longing.

Fiona Vigo Marshall’s work has been published in Aesthetica, Ambit, Fiction, Ink Sweat & Tears, OpenPen, Orbis, Phantom Drift, Prospect, Theology Journal, and Vita Poetica. She is the author of two novels, Find Me Falling, 2019, and The House of Marvellous Books, 2022, paperback 2023, Fairlight Books, Oxford.