An Evocation of Herman Melville
I seek to speak all I know
of my life at close quarters
in the ocean’s experience,
having sailed its heartless swell,
its dark night of the deeps
even in the sight of land
and there the peaceable bounty.
My flesh is frost-withered
in cheerless chill deadening.
I feel my heart’s hunger
that eats into the bone.
I am as one outcast,
a vessel ill-equipped for the crossing
ice-frozen in the worst of winter.
Homeless on the waves alone I hear
the roar that drowns the seabird’s cry.
My compass needle is northward,
and this I follow as if favoured
by the fate of wished fortune,
an enterprise oceanwide.
The quest is for the sea’s eternity.
Geoffrey Heptonstall has worked as a bookseller , managing the Art section of Borders in Cambridge, England. Before that he took charge of French manuscripts for an independent academic publisher in Cambridge. His fourth collection of poetry, A Whispering, was published by Cyberwit June 2023. His first collection, The Rites of Paradise, received critical acclaim when first published in 2020. Sappho’s Moon and The Wicken Bird followed. A novel, Heaven’s Invention, was published by Black Wolf in 2016. The Queen of Alsatia, a novella, was published in Pennsylvania Literary Journal in 2023. A number of plays and monologues have been staged and/or published. He is also a prolific short fiction writer, essayist and reviewer.