In the course of wanting access to all of Cicely Fox Smith’s poems, I had to join AllPoetry.com and submit a piece of my own work.
Once I had access to more of the 600 poems that Cicely wrote, I was able to add this song to my collection of her poems that I have put to a tune. It is probably a little overly romantic in its view of the sailor’s life, but still a beautiful poem. Cicely’s allusion to watery worlds orbiting distant stars was incredibly imaginative for her time.
I have found AllPoetry to be an interesting platform in the way it forces users to comment on other peoples work before posting new poems of your own. Something similar runs on r/OCPoetry but this site is much prettier and the process for commenting far easier to use.
The discussion on the poems I have written in the past but posted in other places before prompted me to think a little more about poems as a form, rather than song. Here is the result of my musings on the recent eruption in Hawaii. Having visited Oahu on many occasions, I am fascinated by the way vibrant life is intermingled with such colossal destruction.
What strange contrivance of space-time created this selection of atoms?
How did the primordial plasma soup settle on the Hydrogen atom,
or its twin Helium as the start of the puzzle.
Why was Carbon so perfect a thread to weave into flesh, vine and moss?
Why not Boron or Flourine to fashion this cornucopia of life.
How did this jumble of bits manifest into the sunset over a snow-caped mountain?
Or the distraught child in his bombed-out Syrian ghetto.
Are we just the palette of some inter-dimensional artist?
Slapped on the canvas of the cosmos with care or indifference as the mood dictates.
What cosmoses float in the eternal ether made of different stuff?
A few more quarks in the Iron, a little less neutrinos in an Oxygen atom.
How can humanity walk through this reality without being stunned,
by the complex intricate nature of this star-stuff we exist in.