Mewslade Bay, 8/11/03
for Flora
Licked into shape by the sea, huge stones
line the beach or group themselves in sand
as if they’d grown here,
taken the marine forms of seaweed
or the first limb-buds of a foetus
in its uncurling
from fish to flesh, their slow erosion
being more of an unfolding than
a wearing away.
Today the wind’s blowing off the shore,
ramming the damp sand hard down the beach
into the sea spray
where the four of us, random figures
in a landscape, are brought together
at Mewslade by you,
your birthday thirty years ago, all
the usual accidents of time and
place, now, in this wind.
‘I’d stay all day, if there were shelter,’
I tell you, but there’s not, so we drift
back towards rock pools
and watch small sea-anemones, winered,
clamped fast to the smooth walls, clinging
on for life itself.
Leaning in, we touch these hemispheres
of lustrous jelly, gently wrinkle
skin that’s cool and sweet,
seeing how underwater they turn
into flowers and wave their petal
tentacles, guileless.
Sometimes it helps to take the long view:
to feel our lives, our frailties, held in
a moment of sand
and stinging cold, a salt clarity
of water, the bunches of red dulse
swinging their thin leaves
in slow ripples under our hands, and
all around, the imperceptible
movement of limestone.
Licked into shape by the sea, huge stones
line the beach or group themselves in sand
as if they’d grown here,
taken the marine forms of seaweed
or the first limb-buds of a foetus
in its uncurling
from fish to flesh, their slow erosion
being more of an unfolding than
a wearing away.
Today the wind’s blowing off the shore,
ramming the damp sand hard down the beach
into the sea spray
where the four of us, random figures
in a landscape, are brought together
at Mewslade by you,
your birthday thirty years ago, all
the usual accidents of time and
place, now, in this wind.
‘I’d stay all day, if there were shelter,’
I tell you, but there’s not, so we drift
back towards rock pools
and watch small sea-anemones, winered,
clamped fast to the smooth walls, clinging
on for life itself.
Leaning in, we touch these hemispheres
of lustrous jelly, gently wrinkle
skin that’s cool and sweet,
seeing how underwater they turn
into flowers and wave their petal
tentacles, guileless.
Sometimes it helps to take the long view:
to feel our lives, our frailties, held in
a moment of sand
and stinging cold, a salt clarity
of water, the bunches of red dulse
swinging their thin leaves
in slow ripples under our hands, and
all around, the imperceptible
movement of limestone.
Page(s) 22
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