Message in a Bottle Revisited

his poem
a bottle
blue glass
glittering
in the sand

washed up
on sea swell
salt and power
ebb and crash
on a distant beach

buried in sediment
until a girl’s bare foot
stumbled upon a jewel
hidden well among
stones and shells

its tattered label
washed by the tide
the message inside
cryptic and secret
spelled out his name

Kim M. Russell, 13th April 2023

Hosting the dVerse Poets Pub Poetics prompt this Tuesday is Grace, all the way from Ontario Province, Canada, where she discovered Canadian Ice Wine, a ‘dessert wine renowned for its intense flavours, rich bouquet and unsurpassed smoothness’. I also discovered Ice Wine, but in Austria, where it became one of the few kinds of alcohol that I am happy to drink and, like the Canadian variety, the bottle is very slim and narrow.

However, Grace’s prompt is not about wine but about bottles! I really like the poems she has given as examples and to inspire us to use the word bottle and its contents in our poems.  What is brewing inside the bottle?  Is there a message in a bottle, or a fantastic pirate ship?  She says we can go real or surreal, and the poetry form is our choice. I am busy preparing for the launch of my pamphlet on Saturday, so I have reposted a poem I wrote for Sanaa’s Meet the Bar prompt back in April this year. 

40 thoughts on “Message in a Bottle Revisited”

  12. I hope she could decipher his name. He may have become famoud, I have him as shipwrecked and had swam to a deserted island, then finally after years was rescued.
    I searched on the word, “bottle” and since 2006 on this blog I’m using had it posted 25 different times
    including the current poem

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  14. I hadn’t noticed the shape of your poem until it was mentioned, and then I thought “This is even better than I originally thought!” Oh, but walking the beach with bare feet — Oh, I shudder at the thought.

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