After 2 long years of continuous Lent,
Lent comes again for a third long time
it’s an annual season which still begins
with giving up on things just because
we can do without, and then by being
done with all that we fretfully will open
a new space where we can finally enter
into something we were formerly too
full to allow to come into existence
and coast into what we really do need
but couldn’t see there waiting for us
so the internet, old youtube.com starts
sending me these new archeological up
date flashes from Utrecht Oudeheden
about Doggerland this North Sea bank
now under the frigid waters in between
Northern England and North Netherlands
Northumbria where my wife’s people came
from and Holland of my grand parents home
town of Haarlem once ALL ONE THING
in neanderthal ice age of giant mammoths
and saber tooth tigers now just these bones
that wash out on the wild roaring coasts
formed when a colossal avalanche sent this
tsunami to cut off England from the continent
and preserve all those once living bones down
in watery burial graves of the vanished animals
and humans between coasts on which my wife’s
and my ancestors once lived over which the ferry
took us so many times from Newcastle to IJmuiden

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.