Sunday Morning – Janet Frame

Focus on Frame

Sunday Morning – Janet Frame

Salt water is poetry.
I did not decide this
or prepare a statement
to astonish; it is always

my pleasure on Sundays
looking out of my window
at the petal-white Dunedin light
to trace the green stalk

to its roots in the sea,
then say as the tentacles
take hold and I drown,
the oxygen of silence withheld –

salt water is poetry
not mine but the providers
whom I thank by reading
and wish never again to breathe the silent air.




I found these poems in an old poetry anthology from school. Unfortunately there isn't a reference for where they originally came from.