Ultra Marine

Marguerite Bunce

Sydney Heads 1925

Word Count 103

Svengali has nothing

on this blue; this is the blue

that will require no action

impose no desire – look into 

this water and you can reflect 

on nothing.

I am a blade of grass

on its edge – a stroke

scraped in a surface – a negative -

a thing – mesmerised.

It is not possible

to focus on the lighthouse – it could not

be weaker – the warning would come

too late, the immersion already complete.

Eyes weak at the knees – compelled

into that slow blue, those trees

of spike, those sails like teeth,

I'm almost at sea

with this unfathomable

prospect.

Marguerite grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she published poetry in some anthologies and won a couple of prizes. When her poems became too long for traditional publication, she wrote a libretto for an opera based on a Bocaccio story from the Decameron. “The Remedy” was performed by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera company. Short films she wrote were shown at the National Film Institute in London and elsewhere. She currently lives in the south of France where she is experimenting in new forms of writing, such as the essay published here.