What H Prays For by Tim Scott

Highly Commended in the 2018 Waltham Forest Poetry Competition, and winner of the Local Prize for poets who work, live or study in Waltham Forest

 

A whale corpse bloats on the ocean’s surface.
Words flicker on its skin, flash white like terns.

Then comes the slow, funereal descent: the final dive
through eerie light; the tentative nudge

and roll across dark sand. Its self snows round it
as it settles into stillness but already there is movement.

The afterlife swims in, to dart and pinch and bite –
this life’s second meaning is a mouthful of cold grease.

Yellow crabs cluster and snip their tiny gutfuls.
Soft nematodes dig heads into ragged blubber, burrow

through the thick, white lard till only a thin membrane
holds the pieces in their place: great filters of baleen;

the blackened tongue; abandoned cockpit of the skull
and great cathedral arches of the ribcage bound

by exposed vertebrae. Loosened by decay,
the fingerbones that hold the fins

turn slowly through the water like spilled dice.
Now, what’s left is monstrous, indescribable by H.

He prays that seabirds squabble on the inside of his head,
begs language ride his tongue like dolphins in the surf.

 

Tim Scott was born in Northern Ireland in 1967, but has lived in London for most of his life. He was introduced to the joys of Walthamstow by his wife and is an ardent fan of all things E17 – except the band. He got into writing poems via courses run by Claire Pollard at City Lit and is a long-standing member of John Stammers’ writing workshop. After studying for an MA in English at Queen Mary’s, he trained as a primary school teacher and is currently studying for an MA in Education at the Institute of Education.

Tim:

The inspiration for the poem is fairly straightforward: I have been part of John Stammers’ City Lit workshop for a few years and, trying to break out of a stylistic rut, I wrote a poem about this character. John suggested I write twenty five of them and see where they took me. It seemed like a good idea, so I went away and did it. Writing through the character allows me to be both less and more myself and better ideas seem to appear in the gap between the pair of us. Generally, I try to let him lead me through an idea just to find out where he ends up.