Poems and Pictures

By Michele Noble

Stormy Night Scarborough South Bay, 2022, 20 x 29 CM

Whale Song

End of Day, Scarborough South Bay, 2022, 20 x 29 CM

SOS

Silent Night, Humber Bridge. 2022

Foreshore

The low tide laps a shore of sticky mud,

drifts of pebbles, sea washed glass,

broken brick rounded by tides,

fingers of seaweed, ogham messages

in trails of tangled sticks.

A juvenile herring gull,

crimson dotted dodo beak

clamped shut, an empty socket

where its eye should be, lies

soft bedded in a fold of shingle.

Feathers breathing, lifting

and falling in a ruffle of wind,

soft grey gloved claws and legs,

furled stiff by rigor.

I mourn this small life lost

bow my head, remember

the simple wooden cross,

rising in the shallows

near the Humber Bridge,

marking a death by suicide.

An echo of my mother

and another jump.