James Lawless | Mediterranean Poetry

James Lawless is a novelist, poet and short story writer who was born in Dublin. He has broadcast his poetry and prose on radio in Ireland and Spain, and he writes occasional book reviews for national newspapers. His awards, include the Scintilla Welsh Open Poetry Competition, the WOW award for fiction, the Cecil Day Lewis Award and the Sunday Tribune/Hennessy and Willesden Herald award nominations. His stories and poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly’s Let’s be alone together, and he was twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He received an arts’ bursary for his well-received study of modern poetry, Clearing the Tangled Wood: Poetry as a Way of Seeing the World. He divides his time between Kildare and West Cork.

Please visit James Lawless at: https://jameslawless.net

Helios

He is standing on the beach in the half-light, a silver colour on the waves forlorn in shedding and receding once more, having spent themselves on the shore. He paints with deft, confident strokes almost hurried as precursors of what he is ultimately about, the Mediterranean, the crepuscular sky, his easel unsteady in a sudden gust. A gull squawks, a child in the distance shouts in unison steady now making captive of the lascivious Neptune. It is growing too dark to image it but he will remember it and draw from it, draw from your dream of a place like van Gogh had done. He thinks of van Gogh in the changing light, the sky vermillion but no yellow, no sunflower as yet but the cosmos always there as in the beginning, the mountain in the distance like a supine whale and the sea shiny in its foam frothing, hungry to consume the land, to mate, this coming together of sea and earth guided by the moon clandestine almost in the quiet of the twilight, a coitus, a shedding again and again since the beginning of time, and we haughty creatures making rules.
She is standing some distance away, her silk beach robe hovering like a wave revealingly blown thigh high by the cheeky wind. She calls his name like an echo in the wind soft, the soft word of PA B LO. The sea answers with its deadly chorus. PA B LO, the word so strange, he being authenticated on a foreign tongue. Who is that person being invoked? He turns around, his brush held aloft. She smiles, tilts knowingly now as she dives.
He tries to convince himself that all this is normal. That all this is quite…okay. All this going on, being sucked into the nuances of the life of a beautiful woman, of a family, of tragedy and discontent, how to get his own head around all this, and all the time he knows it is this beauty that propels him.

Extract from the novel Helios, by James Lawless

For other contributions by James Lawless, please follow the link below:

Dying by the Mediterranean