build me a longboat a beast of a bulker
fell me a forest of fearsome trees
lay oak, overlapping in hull of lapstrake
a clinker keel to claw the waves
chop pine for a mast upright and proud
knot rigging, strong as surge of the storm
stitch me a sail billowed with squall
carve oars from the ash for angry waters
forge me a figurehead with Freyja’s likeness
the heavens to guide us to safe-harbour and home
Kvalsund: (1) A Viking longship; (2) A municipality in Norway
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Sarah Doyle is widely placed and published, winning the WoLF poetry competition and Brexit in Poetry 2019, and being runner-up in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize 2019. She was highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry and in the Forward Prizes 2018. She is currently researching a PhD in meteorological poetry at Birmingham City University.
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