Sea Storm & Thirteen

By Johnny Payne

Featured in New Lyre Summer 2023

Sea Storm

If there is a reason for this suffering 
to purify, to punish, to reinvent 
the mind’s many mistakes, its airy 
penchant to grandiose fantasies 
then let the pain happen, all at once 
or in gradual, instructive phases. 

Let me parse out the blows in frantic phrases 
or quiet ones, meditations inviting 
subtle thought.  I’ll mark my prey and pounce. 
I’ll curse the sky, retract, rave, curse, vent 
until a truth peeks out, one I’ll seize 
and cup in my hands like a candlelit fairy. 

The fatal-feeling hurt at first is scary. 
it passes, just as the moon has marked phases 
and tides’ erratic logic draws the seas 
to shore in irrevocable rhythm, sliding 
in and away, initial fury hurled and spent 
until its heft reduces to an ounce. 

A moon-silvered beach remains, where once 
crawled growing sluices, come to bury 
all traces of land, a flood meant 
to bring down cliffsides, but now grazes 
like kisses, the stone face abiding 
as midnight falls in blue-black peace. 

I sit on that cliff-top hugging my knees 
face covered in mist-dew, here where I ensconce 
my body, mind-spasms gone, pondering 
my suddenly vanished soul-killing agony 
once a leering death-mask, now, a faceless 
stranger on a sand-path who came and went. 

My slender conscience makes a sturdy tent 
to withstand gale-force winds or a light breeze. 
Its fragile yet tough mutability amazes 
me, once the victim of blind, bleak chance 
now the child of a raging parent grown weary 
who sets me in bed, placidly slumbering. 

I know it comes again, this force that rent 
my life so many times, but its blows barely graze 
a being no longer world-weary, only wary. 

Midnight 

Begin in utter darkness, find the moon 
which has been waiting right behind a cloud 
and let it guide you to the crack of noon. 

It was there all along. You looked too soon 
mistaking it at first for someone’s shroud. 
Begin in utter darkness, find the moon. 

The sphere first shows as sight and next as sound 
the thunder’s silent, soft, simmering then loud 
so let it guide you to the crack of noon. 

When clouds come scudding over the inland sound 
the water’s sheen turns shallow yet profound 
then shifts to utter darkness, vanished at noon. 

Horizon’s curve is bending like a spoon 
no path can lead to what’s already found 
and yet it guides you to the crack of noon. 

The hour’s spent; a dozen hours remain 
to trace the orb’s descent beyond the ground. 
Begin in utter darkness, find the moon 
and let it guide you to the crack of noon. 

One a.m.