First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.
Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
– columns of bladderwrack.
It’s as though we’re stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone’s maudlin
and really, ought just to go
home, you sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone,
vaguely uterine jellyfish
– whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.
From: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/glass-hulled-boat
Date: 2004
By: Kathleen Jamie (1962- )