3. The Terror

Flat in her horizon's circle
she on whose flesh
many skulls were split
lay now, unable to die
on that table-top island
where fear like a long white slug
crept from dun water by night.
She heard the plausible undreamt voice:
‘The Admiral left word
that the load should be reduced…'

Yet Lucretia, the power of eyes
when he spared you ten days in his tent!

And appeasement on rocks where none dares investigate
the loud night-cry that no gull gave.
And Jeronimus laughs:
‘Kill the strongest first; hide the bones by dawn.
Then smile like dogs, not wolves, upon the silly sheep.'

And Lucretia
on these small hairs off the Southland's body
saw sky above like the everblue fields of Heaven
where she might never go, and glimpsed,
hid in a wave's diffracting lid,
the utter otherness of coral
the polyp's rainbow house of bone

where timorous flowers fear the eclipsing hand.