Poems

Viking burial

To live and die by fire and the sword,
the loss spectacular, the pyre heaped with spoils moving
as if still impelled by life towards a livid sky,
the sea embracing what the flames must leave, this rite
had dignity: an end more worth the fight than some
slow pacing of the grey land down to musty dark.
Seeing the craft shrink to a wave-rocked cradle
you might think its passenger a child again,
finding the years of sleep life stole from them.
Eyes stung by wind, voices torn by shingle,
each bay-dweller bore this image far beyond that dawn
in verse and song across the waves from vik to vaig
to wick to way to bay, to be cast up on nameless shores
as orphan fragments, pasts spun from their opacity
like light still shining from a dead star.

vik (Icelandic) n. bay, has these and other North European variants

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