Doggerland

By Saanvi Dharman

Twenty thousand years ago this seafloor

was inland steppe. I would have been wading through

lagoons of bramble, between moss and mammoth,

blades of bluegrass lapping waves against my face.

Tonight, the ocean splits

along the coral-toothed maw,

mandible carved from the same mottled wood

as the door to my childhood bedroom.

My cat winds between my legs in welcoming and

my forgotten dreams hang, suspended—

the stars dying in the dust universe

stirred up by his paws on the old patchwork rug.

When a girl is ten years old, the hope inside her

is the same colour as sunset. I could have tugged apart

the shards of darkness sundering the half-light

and plucked my father’s boyhood kite out of

a Bombay sky some four decades past,

and Time would be the broken string

bristling in the soft breeze

but tonight, the fog turns

and Time is a soul mildewing under the sacred fig—

skin whittled away to calcium and sinew,

the relic of a skeleton returned to the sea.

As I sit on the salt-kissed slate formations

two feet from the carcass, watching whimbrels

peck amidst pinecones and broken pebbles,

Time is the temple bell in the distance that

someone else is climbing her brother’s shoulders to set achime. 

Carpenter ants carried segments of God

through the same wispy strands of moonlight

that meets this water in three-toned iridescence:

the scales of the mermaid who wears my memories

in a seaweed weave. A long silver ribbon

looped into a bow at the end of her plait.

Regret is the caravel to whose mast I am chained

and Time is the wrinkle in the waves

when she lifts her head to look at me.

Her eyes are the obsidian shade between black and brown,

clear and glowing—a pearl and a prayer,

two perpetual promises of forever. 

Don't worry, she tells me. The wood will rot.

By Saanvi Dharman