Stillness

 

It was just 

as you’d imagined it. 

 

Kittywakes, murres, even puffins swam 

through the air with flashing wings,

white swoops spreading 

like a summer storm

 

or a comet, each

bright and bold against 

your dark sky mind

singeing the rocks with their 

shooting star calls

and you remembered 

why it was 

that you came

 

looking 

for something lost, or perhaps

just hidden 

between the new chicks that sat

on the shit-stained 

rocks

and what you hadn’t yet dreamed of 

 

something far louder

than this urgency 

burning, turning and tearing sky 

with feathers 

 

but then

perhaps you 

dropped 

or were dropped

as if it claimed you —

 

the stillness, not

the sea, 

but like it —

 

and in it glimpsed 

something you could not 

ever 

have imagined

 

but knew it 

as freedom 

within the hush

 

a waking, tethered only 

by the imagining.