Volume 5 | Issue 2 | June-July
2011 |
Zombies from the Waves
Nigel Burwood
I am proud to have the chance to publish such a crisp and deep poet in my ezine. He gives me the impression that he is a full-fledged poet, as his poems have variety, novelty and beauty. They are aesthetically perfect, in craft and in content. The main thing that bothers him is the way in which mankind loses its space for peace and harmony. I like it. I hold the same view. I welcome Nigel Belwood on behalf of the readers of www.thanalonline.com
Zombies are walking out of the waves
tonight in darkest Suffolk.
Fragments of the night incarnate,
dark denizens of the submerged streets,
closing in on a cosy seaview bungalow.
Within a beaming admiral sinks another gin,
and juts out his breakwater chin,
"nothing to fear" he shouts,
and shakes his angostura bitters
while the walking dead,
wreathed in glistened seaweed,
trample his antirrhinums.
Enter the slaughterers of Slaughden,
ghouls of the sunken village,
half expected all these years,
see their sullen malevolence,
hear their rasping jeers
as they tear off his raddled head
and drop kick it back into the dark sea.
Note: Slaughden is a village near me in Suffolk
that finally went under water in the late 1950s. There
is another submerged village in Suffolk at Dunwich which
inspired an M.R.James ghost story 'Whistle and I'll come to you'.
Oh, and angostura bitters is used for making pink gin - a
favourite drink of naval officers (but you knew that).
Nigel Burwood - Nigel Burwood, British, lives in Santa Cruz, California and also in London and Norfolk part of the year. When he isn't writing poems and publishing them in literary journals, he sells books on the Internet, attends auctions and plays golf. A collection of his poetry is currently published in World's Strand, an international anthology (academici/UK 2006) for which he suggested the title, helping to mold the vision. An English major with a degree from Southampton, favorite poets and writers include Baudelaire, Eliot, Borges, Nabokov and Meades.
