Water has always been a constant theme in Gordon Meade’s poetry, from his earliest memories of the West Sands at St Andrews, through the Northumberland coastline, via County Cork and the canals of Venice, to the beaches and harbours of the East Neuk of Fife. Here is a sample of poems from this beautiful collection.

Beyond the Ninth Wave
By Gordon Meade
Published by Into Books

Beyond the Ninth Wave

What are you given
to start with? A boat –

no oars, no sails, no rudder,
a knife, a flask of water.

Beyond the ninth wave
this is all you need.

Oars are useless;
your strength soon wanes.

Sails are useless;
there is no wind.

And a rudder is useless;
the horizon shows no land.

The water is useful;
all around you is salt.

And the knife is useful
to cut out useless thought.

Hooked

On fishing trips with my father,
I would stand behind him as he cast,
imagining the hook, on the back swing,
embed itself in my cheek and, with a flick
of my father’s wrist, burrow itself
even deeper in through folds of skin

into a bloodied mouth. I would
imagine the pain and the panic that
ensued, both of us fighting to get
the barb free, out through my flesh
and into the fresh river air. Of course,
none of this ever happened. I stood

well back, outside my father’s
reach, underneath a canopy of trees.
Like them, I stood there motionless,
never saying a word, the angler’s perfect
companion. And if I ever developed
into a serious thinker, which I doubt,

that is where it all began,
watching my father fishing in
the River Earn. Him, catching what
he had come for, salmon and trout,
and me, imagining the pain of being
caught, already hooked on thought.

A Sort of Homecoming

The sea is in
one of its strange moods,
forever threatening
to turn brown.

I would like to say
it is gun-metal grey but
it is more the colour
of a faded saddle-bag

like the ones I used
to see in Westerns. The tops
of the waves still manage
to keep their heads

above the water
from which they are
made. Pure white, the only
way they can escape

the general drabness
is by dashing themselves
against the rocks. Further out
there is no such luck.

They have to wait
until they have been
carried to the shore. Like so
many ships before

them, they will come
to realise that the biggest
danger lies when you are
closest to home.

Earthworms
for Geoff Wood

Earthworms, it seems, are made of tongues,
and are able to taste with every inch of their writhing
bodies. What a life of joy they must have,

and a life of horror, to not be able to turn off
life’s every passing flavour. I remember the ones
my father and I used to dig up in the back

garden as bait for our fishing trips. Could they,
I wonder, taste the cold steel of the spade, the shock
of the autumnal air, the heat of our fingers

as we lifted them from the earth, the plastic
of the bag in which we carried them to the river’s edge,
and then, their own blood as we impaled them

on the hooks, the chill of the fresh water, the mouth
of the fish as they were swallowed? What a life, and what
a death – all taste and savour – until the end.

Beyond the Ninth Wave by Gordon Meade is published by Into Books, priced £9.99.