ESTUARY WALK                                                                  

Low, eye-filling tide where we walked yesterday,

shallow shores uncovered, stretched out to

the end of programmed retreat: tangles of

narrow rivulets trickling into slipping sea,

ready to flood, before long, just as naturally,

an irresistible surge, estuary spreading until

each hunchback hedge, each short-trousered tree

calls for a halt, forgetting that it is there

only because the sea is not.

 

Salty breezes play with the shrouds of boats,

like forlorn spinsters, abandoned at a ball,

slouching, grounded on soggy sand and

seaweed, used to such twice-daily squatting

by these rough-painted ugly ducks; floundering,

then settling down by the score as

the last seaward seepages bubble, silently,

pulled down to the precise, the exact

lowest point for the day, then rest.

 

To the South, the ocean waits outside,

stern, patient, like a mother watching out

for her curious child from the water’s edge;

to the North, high in the estuary, freshwater,

where prettier boats still dance, flows down to its

briny cousin, who will take it all in, the child too.

The cries of frenzied gulls bounce off low cloud

and pierce the air close to our battered ears,

a wake-up call to breathe life in.

 

And the light, not being asked to soak up

this or that detritus, no whipped-up storm – the sand

packed down damp and stable – allows us to

see a wider world around us, each far horizon a

work of perfect congruity, that is, as it should be.

To see and hear all this, in just one day, away from

the grey of so much that is our closer neighbour,

from the dark where we so often find ourselves,

the noise of lives in overdrive.

 

The water recedes no more, we have seen

what can be seen and must speculate as to

what the next flow will bring and what its

ebb will leave behind. I muse over the

sovereignty of the ocean – a goose-pimple notion

if ever there were one: unchallengeable,

unmanageable, matchless; and of which we

know so little – each trip a twist of mystery,

a riot of imagination.