Content warning: mentions of drowning, death of a child
“Writing long-hand in a notebook feels like a safe space, if only because I’m usually the only person who can read my messy handwriting!”
The sea giveth and the sea taketh away
Some will rake the deep and gouge the seabed lifeless,
some will strive to keep afloat deflating dinghies.
Their forebears may have plucked the fruits of the sea,
riding the surf in boats they built themselves or at least,
in vessels they trusted: infants returning to the breast,
time and again, blessing the life-giving brine.
But these two sisters huddle over their phones,
held by a darkness in flux, faces caught in a glow.
Their chatter is silent, receives no response from
the strip of land at a distance too great to swim across,
and no one notices the small boy’s hand that slips
from his father’s when the swell rolls over and tucks him in.
See, these waves may have witnessed the first time
vertebrate life crawled onto dry land,
but now they swirl around the hands and knees
of the few who made it to a shore of promised refuge,
who let go of everything save their names,
their rucksacks and shoes a trail of tokens on the seabed.
Except the man who searched for his child underwater,
taste of salt in his mouth and clothes an icy armour
that pulled him under. The sea remained an expanse of
blackness lapping at a starless night, while he
envisioned a garden that wouldn’t be burned or bombed,
a garden of jasmine and roses and a child’s laughter.
Tomorrow the tide will deposit his corpse on the sand
with the shreds of a raft never meant to ferry so many.
This is an extremely moving poem which challenges the “Stop the Boats” rhetoric. How did it come about and what are the pressures in writing about such a sensitive subject?
Thank you for saying this, Zoë. We all hear and read about the tragedies unfolding on our shores and, personally, I have found these increasingly distressing. The idea of the poem originated from a sense of powerlessness, shame and anger when seeing how this crisis is handled, when reading about the hate rhetoric and how it’s translated into law. I believe that no one has the right to treat other human beings the way our governments treat refugees. The term itself implies high vulnerability and these people have no other choice but to flee their home countries, by whatever means possible.
It seemed only right to focus on the humanitarian aspect. I may not be able to physically carry these people to safety, but I can at least use my craft to draw attention to their plight and, hopefully, give back their dignity and humanity. It is such a big subject, though, as well as a very emotionally charged one, and I’ve never been good at writing in the heat of the moment. I needed time to consider the facts I read about, time to work up the courage to face such a daunting topic. To do so, I took lots of notes. Writing long-hand in a notebook feels like a safe space, if only because I’m usually the only person who can read my messy handwriting! This habit was particularly important here: it allowed me to sift through the thoughts and feelings triggered by the subject. Slowly, the notes began to take shape. One thing that remained at the back of my mind, though, was that I didn’t want it to turn into a rant, as this would have been off-putting and, ultimately, would have led to a failure to engage with the reader. I also didn’t want the poem to be ‘just’ a lament as, this too, would have risked turning the text into something unpalatable. I needed to find some kind of balance, hence the introduction of a wider context: trying to take a step back, but without losing the personal, human aspect. Stating facts while retaining a core of humanity. So, yes, quite a bit of pressure there!
The title of the poem echoes Job 1:21 (“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away”), replacing God with the sea, and this comes to take on far more meaning by the end of the poem. What is your approach to titles and what do you want a title to do for a poem?
I usually struggle with titles and lot of my titles are very literal and/or deadpan. They have this ‘does what it says on the tin’ quality, something which one or other aspect of the poem will then belie, thus creating an unexpectedness. And it’s this unexpectedness I look for when, occasionally, I play with well-known quotes, subvert them one way or another, as is the case here. The religious reference in the title hints at the various dogma we still subscribe to (for better or worse) and how these beliefs, be they religious or political, sometimes lead us to make disastrous choices that harm not only our fellow human beings, but also our environment. And, as is becoming increasingly obvious, environmental and societal issues are intricately linked. This particular phrase, I felt, lent itself perfectly to the poem not only because the idea of giving and taking evokes the tides, but also, since all life originated in the oceans, it seemed natural to liken the sea to a deity. After all, our ancestors did just that for millennia. And of course, while the sea can provide a livelihood, it can also prove lethal, something which often features in songs about the sea as well.
You use couplets here which allow the story to unfold but give us space to take in each nugget of a stanza. Is it a form you enjoy using?
This particular poem needed, as you rightly pointed out, to provide the reader with some emotional breathing space between each scene, each image. This became obvious after the first drafts, which had much longer stanzas, making the text far less digestible: too many different images, each with their own emotional charge, were crammed into single stanzas, which would have risked diluting the meaning of each. Also, couplets suited the change in rhythm from the first to the second stanza and enabled me to get something ‘punchy’ (pace-wise) in at the start, before letting the story unfold.
Generally, I do enjoy using couplets, provided it suits the poem. I find that they lend an airiness to the text, which makes for comfortable reading, allowing the reader to pause, reread lines, then pick up the text where they’d left it. But when I first start on a poem, most of the time I don’t have a specific form in mind – I tend to simply type out the text as one, or maybe two blocks, before deciding on line cuts, punctuation and stanzas. Sometimes, it becomes a prose poem. The choice usually emerges from the text, particularly after reading it out loud: I find that that’s when line length becomes clear and rhythm is tweaked until it flows in such a way as to fit the content.
B. Anne Adriaens
B. Anne Adriaens (she/her) is a Belgian immigrant based in Somerset. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Skylight 47, Amsterdam Quarterly and Stand Magazine (forthcoming). Both her poetry and her fiction reflect her interest in alienation and dystopia.
Photo credit: Ines Adriaens
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