The Sunday Poem: Caledonian Creation Myth

I was in a mythological mood, at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. Hence the title. And yeah, it’s a poem about sex. Sorry. At least it’s sex in the cosmic, way-the-world-turns sense, the ocean-and-earth sense.

Caledonian Creation Myth

It begins, a courtship
Like others, earth and wave
Meeting on the strands
And sand, a wet periphery, an
Intersection. He laps at her
Shores, and she erodes until
In time the tide of moons,
Of fancies, of chocolates and
Flowers, of all the mechanisms of the heart,
Bring them to lick salt from each other —
Salt of earth, of sea — until
They merge in the movement of the ocean.
From this, a life is born.
It is like this everywhere —
Everywhere it is like this.

Edinburgh, April 23, 2004