by the hoar rock in the drowned wood*
there was once
a feasting-cup city
pearl and aquamarine
of its precincts and palaces
sea-green peridot
of its square miles
but no one knows a way back
through time
to when Lyonesse
was fresh from the hands of its makers
No one can bear to think
of its libraries
given to or snatched up
by the sea,
illuminated missals,
neatly-kept annals,
mathematical and philosophical
treatises of its thinkers,
rare volumes swollen
and blotched beyond rescue
Are its people lost
in the sullen courts of sleep**
or are they listening even now
for the approach
of the first responders,
hoping to be ferried to safety,
not daring to look back at
roofs, walls, belfries of the foundered town?**
*The Anathemata, David Jones
**Sunk Lyonesse, Walter de la Mare
clad me naked
from the coffers of Lyonesse
a weather wringing its hands
from the tongue of Lyonesse
silence billing and cooing
from Lyonesse as she was and is
everything you could possibly ask for
an empty hopechest
a hornpipe a fingerbone
Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall. Her most recent publication is Father Lear, a pamphlet from Poetry Salzburg, August 2020. Her thirteenth collection, Lyonesse, appears from Bloodaxe, in 2021. Twitter @penelopeshuttle
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