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St Agnes, Isles of Scilly.

ST WARNA'S WELL

Three steps down into the hole, her back hunched, and the bent pin pitched into this dark triangle of water trapped by the groin in the stone. Let it rust in the red sediments of pins gone by, dropped in by old ones, whose bones lie in loam.

All is crooked and awry.

The seas are crooked, and our stones hide crooked faces, with crooked teeth of quartz. Our fingers crooked from cold; our guts hunger-crooked.

                       Let the fronded fern

Overhang the crooked pin, and may the warping wind make true her crooked will.

                       And when the blue Velella

that ribboned our crooked shores has filled the air with the sweet stench of sea-jellies rotting, and the salt has bleached each sail to a plastic film,

then winter shall come, wreaking woe, and the crooked pin

                              she will remember.

Source material: Legend has it that a crooked pin dropped into the Iron Age well of St. Warna, on the south coast of St. Agnes, will cause a ship to wreck. Such pins have, in fact, been found inside the well. Velella velella, a blue hydroid from Caribbean waters, is occasionally stranded en masse on Scillonian shores. This was the case in September 2004, when this poem was written.