feet – Mick Canning

Poem number five in my Poem-A-Day-For-A-Week-Or-So series. Snow outside, test cricket on the TV, beer in the cupboard. That’s my day sorted, then.

The sea sighs for you tonight.

It sucks at the shingle

And smears your footprints

Like a wet thumb rubbed across writing.

Where once you walked and left your

Prints, it gently wipes the land clean.

Lovingly it lays its cheek to the ground

And nuzzles your memory.

We are more than specks

In the infinity of time and space

Yet somehow we need to

Make sense of our lives.

Rock endures

But so does the wind and the rain.

More so, in fact, since in the end

Mountains are levelled

And the wind and rain remain.

In the end the passage of many feet

May be more durable than

Dwellings of stone.

salt-workers

I should feel like an Egyptian pharaoh,

But I never had all that splendour.

Mine was such a short life,

And then I was mummified for the Hereafter.

There was never anyone to wait on me,

To bring me delicacies or fan away the flies.

You could not imagine Liz Taylor

Wanting to play my part in a film.

But I want you to take a moment or two,

To imagine that your feet and hands

Are permanently covered in cracks and crevices.

And to imagine the constant burning pain.

And contemplate now, the virtual blindness

That comes from seeing – day in and day out –

The bright sun reflected from the brilliant white

Of salt, from horizon to horizon.

And breathing, such a natural thing!

But even breathing was slowly killing me.

Coughing, spitting, rasping breath and breathlessness

And worse…

And when I died, they could not burn me.

Not properly, for the years of salt had seeped

Into my skin and as a final indignity,

Ensured that even death was not a true escape.

Sprinkle, sprinkle on your dish,

Shut your eyes and make a wish,

Up above the world so high,

If there’s a watcher in the sky,

Pray they somehow can arrange

For this indignity to change.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the extremely difficult conditions endured by Indian salt workers – and many others all over the world (the link is here should you care to read it) – which I don’t think have eased since then.

As you add salt to your meal today, think of them.