When all you have is broken
And all you loved seems gone
Walk back to nature’s healing
Where human life was born.
Cool rivulets and rocky coves
The motion of moon tides
The swoop of sea birds in the place
Where sea and shore collide.
Walk on her perfect beaches
Feel sand between your toes
Look past the furthest reaches
Of all we’ll ever know.
We’ve come too far away from her
And somehow must return
Forgive and find our feet again
It’s not too late to learn.
When summer beats upon the shore,
we’ll stand and watch its hue, allured
by Nature’s power and grace, as if
in awe… as if in her immortal face
we find some comfort, some respite
from human cares.
So in my prayers I call the sea,
in dreams I gather clouds;
beyond all bounds I call on Nature’s dignity
to dress this broken rock
with warmth and tender flowers.
liquid
shifting & snagging
creating & ruining
simultaneously approaching & leaving
directional & meandering
lifting, caressing, drifting
distracted, focussed & eager
coating, cleansing & clearing
one & everything
out of nowhere, everywhere
never-ending
carving routes to another place.
The tide tipped and turned
Sweep-blow-draining all away.
One cafe remains.
One broken cup man
orders customary chips
and consults his stars.
His hopeful soul
hangs loose in the empty bay
waiting for a wave.
Toes, waist, chest, chin, then swallowed by the sea,
I’m a mermaid, brought up on ear popping sandstone rock,
sent to salsa through a musical element not our own,
where fish may do-si-do through lace of flimsy lungs.
Dive with me heartlong through musical wave ranges,
sparking the excitement of a gazillion castanets.
Let me tantalise you with Chalchiuhtlicue’s castanets,
while jealous Eurybia pirouettes by us in the sea.
Now we’ll reach below the surface for deeper ranges,
and I’ll show you how to roll the waves and rock
in ecstatic freedom, with fine, uninhibited lungs,
until you exclaim, and claim the water as your own.
Then you and I can find a soundscape of our own,
a balletic collaboration, moving beyond castanets,
to a place where dolphins commune and human lungs
split into feather gills, fleet and sexy for the sea;
where we will meet our thermal origins, ready to rock,
and pause to play great fossil pipes at unheard ranges.
When we have absorbed those harmonic underwater ranges,
and sea beard grows between teeth not quite our own;
when we have become our ancestors, and belong to the rock;
somewhere above us still will play those spangled castanets,
and as you lay yourself on my shelf beneath the sea,
so the dance of our bodies will return us up with new lungs.
First breath, as we surface, oxygen thrust into salty lungs;
First cry, as we emerge, sound splintering mountain ranges;
First swim, as we splash, amazed, to the music of the sea;
sent to salsa through an element not our own,
accompanied by the clap of Chalchiuhtlicue’s castanets,
we’ll reach a place where water drums roar on sandstone rock.
We’ll help each other up, upon the drums of sandstone rock,
and, beating chests, exalted in our triumph, fill our lungs
with air, sea below us clapping – a gazillion castanets,
we’ll sing of life and rock and roll and mountain ranges,
and know the music of the earth, which we can never own,
but that we clambered up to dance to, from the sea.
From our hold upon this rock, the clapping of castanets
and our own song, belted with the mighty power of human lungs,
rings out across mountain ranges, and to the bottom of the sea.
Though on the surface splashes only briny wave;
there is one regret,
stirring darkly in the deepest corner of a cave.
.
Though I pull my eyes from the oily fear I find;
there is yet something,
scratching saline places hidden well and left behind.
.
If I might switch and dive my life to swim again;
on that returning tide,
I would void my lungs to wipe away one dreadful stain.
Angry as a woman ever was—
her file of life a medical lexicon
she left it all behind and plunged into the sea
assaulted by bitter rainfall on her weeping skin
body escaping from confines of wet crumpled clothes
and hair of seaweed falling through galloping waves.
All things come to an end and even pain
with all its earthly wires and strange responsibility
cannot hold us unless we will consent to stay
to keep human vigil for those who choose to swim away.
I looked at him and
he looked back with big brown eyes
then we leapt and swam
Why ever I was
chosen I will never know
the moment so brief
But to hold his gaze
restored childhood fantasies
of another life
peopled with creatures
who commune rather than fight
then swim together
Columns of beaten Crustacea, we shift across hot sand
carrying each one pinch determination to abandon land
throw anxious glances back to check we’re unobserved
in our last gasp endeavour to stage a smooth return.
Curved carapaces arching toward the pulling tide
cracked pincers raised, we dance our sidewards glide
treading warily, alien slapping waves in this aftermath
of countless million years without the saline bath.
Yet as murk and weed permeate marks of failure and despair
we leave the crooked path as if we were never there.
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