BILL BOYD POETRY



TSUNAMI BLACKWATER

Textbook Tsunami
Classroom Tsunami
Google Tsunami
Only talk the clean educated scholarly research version
Waves water forces swell crest water clean ocean speed wavelengths
Unproblematic
Cleanwater
Naturewater

Japanese woodcut Tsunami
Shines
Benevolent moon on the wave crest spray
Friendly Mount Fuji
Paternal avuncular
Fishers
Balancing boats in successful sea harvest

Breadfruit tree Tsunami
Dead and dying broken limbed infested
Speak only of the Blackwater
Bumping grinding tearing poisoning crashingboatspeoplebuildings
Against defenceless limbs
Catching sarees
To remain in upper branches flapping in a memory wind
Prayer flags for the lost

Broken boats
Ragged edged upturned stranded impaled
Crying for a floating past abandoned
Speak of the angry spirits
Punishing forcing land and sea to merge
Slurry blur of boundaries sacred
Drowning in the Blackwater

My tears
Speak
Stories
Lost
Repeated repeated repeated
Identifying the living alive the dead remembered families decimated
Futures snatched washed clean bodies
Found and unfound
Haunting broken lived forever
Born of the Blackwater

Blackwater
Is the whitewater truthwater
Tsunami water saturating churning stolenlife
Blackwater Deathwater

Bill Boyd, 2000



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