A New and Accurat Map of the World Drawne according to ye truest Descriptions, latest Discoveries & best observations y.t have beene made by English or Strangers

Photo by Seán Kiely

I have made landfall with a mouth full of sand,
tossed from the sea with splintered fingers
and a barnacled belly.

I will eat nameless fruits and hope against poison. 
I will watch the moon rise while the turtles hatch
and make their flappy way to water. 

I will scrimshaw a comb for a sweetheart
I never had and sing to longfeathered birds
shanties of blood-red roses.

I will find passage on a passing caravel.
I will return to the town I once called home.
I will draw maps but make no claim
that they are true, only

that these are the things 
I have seen and the places
I believe I have been.

Lydia Kennaway is the winner of the 2017 Flambard Prize and her pamphlet, A History of Walking, will be published by HappenStance in the autumn of 2019.  Her poems were shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize and longlisted in the 2018 Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition.  Other poems have appeared in The Rialto, Strix and the 2014 Hippocrates Prize Anthology. ‘A New & Accurat Map of the World…’ comes from Lydia’s sequence, Dislocations, written for the Finding Places module of the MA in Writing Poetry. It first appeared in the anthology, Any Change? Poetry in a Hostile Environment, edited by Ian Duhig and launched on National Poetry Day 2018’.