Poetry: Far out at sea by Tamara von Werthern

 

Far out at sea

 

The fox outside

Barks harshly

A cough and a scream

Rolled into one

 

A bit of wild outside

Roaming through our gardens

And his cry tears through the night

Leaves me wide awake

 

In darkness, in this room, this house

Where I must stay where I am safe

Cocooned in walls, my blanket heavy

And my thoughts swirling

 

For a while we were suspended

Like a comic book figure over the abyss

But the fall will come

I can see now that it will

 

And that everything will change

Nothing can stay as it was

We must morph and adapt

And find new ways to navigate the world

 

When we’re allowed to leave this safety net

That’s pulling close across our soft throats

The more we thrash in it, like fish, slippery

In their net, on the heaving hulk of a boat

 

Far out at sea.

 

Tamara von Werthern is an award-winning playwright based in Hackney.

You can read more about the success of her dystopian short film, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, here.

Her play The White Bike, and climate change book Letters to the Earth, featuring her contribution, are available at Pages of Hackney bookshop on Lower Clapton Road, which is currently closed but still selling book tokens.