Voyage to Labrador, by Gregory E. Lucas

Voyage to Labrador, by Alfred Wallace (Cornwall) 1935-1936

Voyage to Labrador

Illness shows no mercy
as I wake to daydream
of a painting’s winter world:
aboard a lonesome ship
that Alfred Wallis has coloured
as earthy as the muddy ground
outside my bedroom window,
I ride through blue-white slush
rolling on the Labrador Sea.

Skeletal icebergs
gleam ghostly blue
in an everlasting midnight.
Not a single star shines,
and I cannot tell which way
the chugging ship will go:
into that comb of frigid teeth,
away from the pain of disease
that breaks a man in two?
or toward growing hope
of finding courage to renew
myself, however marred?

Crescent waves of lilies
outside my open window                                                 
flutter like a gull’s wings,
bend like whitecaps on the sea;
some, freed from their stems
by a gust, swirl past the sash
and fall like ruined hopes
to the floor by my bedside
while quarter bells clang,
echo off the polar coast.

From the ship’s two chimneys
smoke rises, curves over the bow
as I whisper unanswered prayers
that blend with the engine’s hum.
Throughout the eternal night,
no one keeps me company;
all others sleep below the deck
while turbulent currents whirl
past claw-like ice-chunks:
talons that grasp like death.

While flower petals gather
in shadows near my bed,
through the arctic sea
in the gilded frame I ride,
listening to a seabird’s
far-off fading cry.

Gregory E. Lucas

This poem originally appeared in Ekphrasis.

Gregory E. Lucas writes fiction and poetry.  His short stories have appeared in Pif, The Horror Zine, Freedomfiction.com and in other magazines.  His poems have appeared in Ekphrasis, Yelllow Mama, Better Than Starbucks, in previous issues of The Ekphrastic Review, and in other magazines.