Submarine Sentinal

During the Writing the Waves Flash Poetry Competition at the Plymouth Athenaeum, we were given a photo of an underwater statue at the Lanzarote Underwater Museum. This is what I produced to the 30-minute, 14 line regulations:

I stand where the cerulean light 

filters down through the shallows,

my likeness to any who once lived

worn smooth by the silt-filled currents

until I have no face, no eyes,

a blind watchman of a vast nothingness.

Here my feet have rooted for millennia,

a natural stone pillar grown from the ocean floor,

a god to all that crawls, swims, slithers,

and a witness to all that died.

Now I sense I stand where the pale light falls,

where their fragile skeletons have come to rest

so now it is no longer sand between my toes

but the remnants of life, dead things, from an alien heaven.

I may make some changes to this at a later date, or write a new piece based on the same picture