CanaDiana member British poet, Dianne Pacitti, finalist in the Accenti Poetry contest

 Dianne Pacitti, finalist in the Accenti Poetry Contest 2021 with the poem "Unfoundland"

 

Accenti Poetry Contest 2021 Finalists

Unfoundland
by Diane Pacitti

When they were old men
they couldn’t recall if they had strode that mystery,
or if another sailor had bragged of walking
on the broad backs of cod
all the way to the shore

of the new found land;
though even Caboto himself
might have baulked at that word ‘found’:
his tensed eyes
saw nothing you could pin down, only landfall

receding into mist, and a wild grey sea
shape-shifting
into translucent islands,
learning to crackle and splinter;

learning to soften
to slob ice, and then be washed ashore
as lolly turned to slush:

a liminal place,
a borderland which surfaces and fades
in the throats of its own people, through words
which bob up
and hide beneath the tide of standard speech;

sudden as a wind
that stretches cheeks in a screecher; or perhaps
in a damp muggy day which closes the lips
to murmur mauzy, or with the force
of brickle ice exploding harsh consonants
in throat and mouth.

it is a language
like distant glim; its words as elusive
as a fairy squall, a gust which appears
to come from nowhere.

A standard speaker
is strangered by this tongue, feels as displaced
as perhaps Caboto did when he returned
to the jewel-hard light of Venice, learnt to live
with palaces and towers, yet in his dreams
still walked a squirming silver bridge of fish,
the nearest thing he could find
to solid land.