Two Poems by James Peake

The Wave

After Ammianus Marcellinus

The sea upped and left like someone offended,
too jealous to say why, the waters we’d known
all our lives gone. We lived in the Alps!
The luckier boats fell near enough
to let down souls on untrodden earth
where newborns flashed, slapping their tails
and thrashing in puddled water, knocking
rocks in their throes but silent in themselves.
Mounds of rubbish, bags, fishing gear,
encrusted concrete and chains, straight lines
and circles imperfected by the sea.
We were quicker than flies to pass
the old boundary, bits of voice and laughter
from many sides as we gathered fish and shellfish
in baskets, sponges, curios, choice metal,
first shoppers through the Boxing Day door.
The sea returned unannounced
and what horizontals survived
bore the face-up or -down dead,
a vast haul, too fresh to smell,
jellies, grasses, a boat on a roof.

The Third City

Like glare from a nearby stadium,
like sticks of furniture sharpened
on a premature dawn,
the next postcode has jumped,
it’s tomorrow there. No rooftop clutter,
birds or vapour, how for a stay

the sky was foreign, first un-
and then manned, from metal work and platform,
pointedly constructed, hard and stunning

on a city already compacted,
theirs, ours, maybe anyone’s
who cares the more, no slate being
clean - soot where a sign
has been taken down —

and the aimer at his camera, open, shut,
the pluperfect photograph.

James Peake’s second full-length collection, The Star in the Branches, was published by Two Rivers Press in February 2022. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, most recently Wild Court, Raceme, and The Spectator. He lives in London and works in independent podcasting.