Trois Matelots du Port de Brest, Death Letter and Natural Bridge Sweet

By Johnny Payne

Featured in New Lyre Summer 2022

Trois Matelots du Port de Brest 

Three ships sailed on a sea’s soft swell 
a small sea, but one full of wrecks. 
In those wrecks, drowned men, their spent bones 
and from those bones, reefs, furred with moss. 
By them swam fish, bright as deep sun shafts. 
In those shafts, flecks of gold in drifts. 

On the beach, sand cleaved in big drifts. 
Their edges seemed to shrink and swell. 
The dunes curved; sole things split by shafts 
of light, as if they were old wrecks 
all void of fish, flecks, reefs, or moss 
but yes, filled with dead men’s spent bones. 
Wind swept the sea, chilled men’s warm bones. 

Most died. The ship was left to drift. 
Planks cracked; each fresh corpse smelled like moss 
and with its rot, the soft flesh swelled 
the way oak trees do when ships wreck 
until it shrank thin as a shaft. 
The Lord’s wrath falls like a sharp shaft.