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After seeing the British Museum's Sunken Cities exhibition
Caroline Maldonado
The sea between Alexandria and Crete
tips up dinghies, spills out their cargo,
summons one hundred and seventeen lives below
to stock its own museum. Record this date.
A mother holds her baby high to be saved
before she drowns; a man sinks like a column,
like a statue, but not for him a resurrection,
no human limb is fashioned with granite’s weight
nor is soft flesh preserved in metres of silt.
Their corpses like buoyant wood are swept by waves.
Today all along the shoreline they drift.
A fisherman comes upon a sandy grave,
returns to shroud each body with a cloth
as more emerge, not one of them with breath.
Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator and her poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines, in anthologies and online. Publications include: What they say in Avenale (Indigo Dreams, 2014) and translations from Italian, together with Allen Prowle, of Rocco Scotellaro's poetry in 'Your call keeps us awake' (Smokestack, 2013). She lives in the UK and Italy.
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter (wveditor@gmail.com)
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