The Sun Sailors
Your smoking towns are new to us:
each breathing home, each burning hearth.
We come from astral flame and fire.
We are voyeurs to death and birth.
We touch the cheeks of sleeping boys
and pass our friends who fly on by.
We lose ourselves in nooks and holes
and penetrate your winking eye.
We sink into the waters dark -
the crystal deep of foreign hue.
We visit crabs and sharks and eels
and are swallowed by demonic blue.
Then rising up from ocean peaks,
we settle on the grassy moors.
Brothers lost to leaves and thorns,
thrown from rowan tree to gorse.
From here we fly to daffodils,
canaries, butter, bumblebees.
We bounce around your breakfast eggs,
assault your face from blocks of cheese.
We’re packaged into wooden crates,
from China, Florida, Italy, Spain.
Then flee from fruity orange globes
and are reflected back again.
Then when you bleed, and beads of life
drip to the sink, towards the drain,
you only really know at all
because we tell your wincing brain.
And then we die, or so you’re told.
But we go on; we give and take.
We soar beyond the human realm
and swoop below to speak with snakes.
