Mike Ferguson
SEA TODAY
We saw the sea today – still there – both of us in the cold,
facing up to its challenge in the winter wind and
walking in that slow uncertainty which still accounts for
progress. How does this simple endeavour also amount
to a calculation, and can I find enough to keep going
in its measureable pace? Easy enough in consideration of
our time before and more to come, however filled, if
we can at the very least keep moving forward together.
We’ll need to see if it can carry and create, which is all in
belief and believing, and I again must count and calculate
how much to lose myself in the ebb and flow of such a hope.
We were there today, but tomorrow can become catastrophe
and what was disappears in less drama than what a word
connotes, or in the seabed mine waiting to detonate.
* * *
DOORS
Doors open to different rooms –
so few I have been able to walk through –
their dark stain added to by the grime of
pressing fingers themselves coloured with
age and wear, and pushed the same way
by all these years where there has been no
movement. I stand to watch and it is as if
each opening is closed by anticipation.
And so it is by looking through this,
what might have been is in the distances.
It is only a moment, and swinging to,
each shuts and shows the marks as patterns of
not going but moving here and there
and always in the stasis of this stare.
Mike Ferguson’s most recent poetry collection is the sonnets chapbook Precarious Real
(Maquette Press, 2106). A retired English teacher, he co-authored the education text Writing Workshops.
(Cambridge University Press, 2015).
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