Byronic Voyage

By Martin Potter

The quick shifting Middle Sea
Days of serene heat and sudden
Wreck-inducing storms threaten
Your tempered fragility

Ribcage of brittle timber afloat
Adrift in classic waters dreaming
Soaked in sublime and epic readings
Inimical to potentates

Shore breaching wreaking ports
In flawed charisma inspired fever
Devouring words faces grammars
With borderless appetite

To scale Alps and chase the Rhine
Climbing ambitions swimming notions
Geneva’s rest or Venice reflections
But the soul’s medicine

Sought in warmer regions bright
Islands sun-burnt shores but courter
Reckless for freedom in fraught empires
Your odyssey incomplete



Inspiration behind the poem:

This poem was inspired by Byron’s travels, around the Mediterranean and in Europe, but overlaps this with the idea of voyaging at a more abstract level, a voyaging of the mind, or the soul. The notion of unfinished-ness is also something I wanted to bring out.


Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Edinburgh, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals as well as in Black Bough anthologies. His pamphlet In the Particular was published in 2017.