Seaside Cabin Blues

Shisa Poet

That summer, the flower-box nasturtiums were all leaves
crusted with blackfly, hardly any gold-trumpeted blooms.
She overslept and missed her quiet coffee at low tide
in the south bay. Then she found the only coffeepot, blue
china with a cracked lid, had been thrown out by relatives.

Pushing out the row-boat, she cut her foot on rocks
and couldn't swim off the pier for days. New pipes
had been laid, uprooting wildflowers and leaving the lawn
a dry and rutted grey, sticks marking watertank and drains.

Mist cloyed off the sea, seeped into biscuits, pillow, books.
The large sunny kitchen was closed off for refurbishment
and her varnish pooled unevenly on the floor, where mosquitoes
stuck as if in amber under a window left open by mistake.

Brown algae flourished in the lukewarm inlet. Driftwood
and juice cartons needed raking off the beach. She had brought
the wrong selection to read: the mystery and a feminist novel
mismatched her mood, the poetry was too familiar. Sea shanties
or the Rolling Stones failed to penetrate through earphones.

Her mobile phone rang rarely, and it turned out she had packed
far too little to drink for the week. A new type of seaweed
thrived in her bathing-spot, a dirty green, slimy to the touch.

Old lovers were gone to other commitments. She wrote
a poem over sandwiches outside, while scissor-beaked
seabirds pecked at mussels. The paper clung damply
to the grey slate-table, and every last line seemed superfluous.

---

Shisa Poet (aka Karin Henderson) has been published in paper journals like Euphony, The Healing Muse and ezines like Small Spiral Notebook, Carnelian, Stirring, Gumball Poetry.