Poetry & Story by Jeremy Limn : St Helens & Pearl Harbor

St Helens

Bless your shadow
be sauteed in the robust
hymns of St Helens' king tides
where you reach
for the love of Tasmanian
life of spectral tasting of a
 Willie Smith's apple ciders 
and we walk along the shores with
fishing rods hoping for something to
catch, perhaps a gummy shark, 
and we know the art of eye-gazing
nature we take in like
with a Murakami touch
and we talk of Hemingway
and crispness of the divine
eating away at the beauty
of cathedral-like caves
phantasmagoric sands
genuinely genuflected 
with how the sun rises
in the morning, we are moved
and caught in
this stanza drifts onwards
into the sea-lights 

Pearl Harbor

Their love lingers on these shores, and the rockpools are coalescing in the memory of a shattered, eternal love. It was nostalgia that brought Melody Atkins back to where the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.  It wasn’t the brightness or the beauty of the blue rhapsodic waters that brought Melody Atkins back to where her father faded into the fire.  It was the screaming, scorching memory of her Father’s last moments. 

A naval officer with a bright future his wife gone, and the future of his child in disarray. Peter Atkins got the signal, and call via radio that the Japanese were twenty minutes away from bombing Pearl Harbour into smithereens.  

Peter didn’t know what to do all he could do was evacuate his family, evacuating the love he will never see again. He won’t be able to hold his wife in his hands anymore or see his future daughter born.  But he knew what he had to do was get them out of there. All he could do was send them away the biggest sacrifice he would ever make, and as he directed the other naval officers to take Henrietta Atkins to higher ground. 

He teared up and gave her a kiss that would turn into the shadow of the blue moon that Melody would come to see later when she visited the shoreline where Peter first fell in love with Henrietta under the moon in Honolulu.  

Bio: Jeremy Limn is a 28-year-old poet who has published three books of poetry, Raining Poems, The Auguries of Lost Lilacs, and The Roses Forget You, his work also appeared in the 2016 July Issue of Infernal Ink Magazine, and the Yearbook for the University of Tasmania 2015, and published twice with Vext Magazine, The Ernest Becker Foundation.