When I Was an Inland Sea

(or Conversation with my Future Son in a Dream)

Debbie Lim

What was it like before I was born?

We lived in a place where it was always warm. This was the time before seasons. I was a small sea, land-bound, steam lifted at my yellow edges. The future was far off then, impossible to imagine.

What did I look like?

You were the soft-toed dawn horse, my eohippus. Though you did not yet have a name. For this was the time before language and fear, before wild and tamed. But you knew no enemies, least of all the enemy that is your darkest self.

What did I live on?

Low tender leaves of course, love’s oscillations, daylight, a mother’s omnipresent blood. There was always enough.

What could I hear?

I imagine, dragonflies’ thrum. The suck of mud, which is a kind of longing. Also, the creak of trees, soft hatchings of rain. A whole forest ticking. Occasionally, too, the distant roll of volcanoes.

How did I come to you?

Always in waves, my darling. First, imperceptible, finally a crashing down through aeons. But I have such little recollection of it now, that strange drowning.

And in what form did I arrive?

A beached moon.
A palpitating stone.
A tornado at my breast.

This sleeping prophet in my arms.

[This poem first appeared in Debbie Lim’s Bathypelagia, Cordite Books, May 2025, and is reprinted with kind permission from the publisher.]

DEBBIE LIM received the 2022 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Beastly Eye was published by Vagabond Press. Her first full-length collection Bathypelagia was published by Cordite Books in 2025.