Umbels of hogweed,
sparse of seed,
quiver in seeded breeze.
The cold wind soughing in pines
rocking tall crowns or flattened tops;
sere grass, white-bearding bushy mounds -
hips the only berry-glee.
Broad low-tide foreshore,
dimpled, ridged like long-soaked wrinkled skin,
laked, pooled and puddled,
wouldn't cover a canvas shoe
save where a channel cuts sand.
Look down on a broad river
from the aircraft of your own, two-legged height
and hop across, assisted by a stick.
The wreck's a mussel colony:
bottom of the hull is all,
sand bedded,
riding out storms, unmoving;
but today sea's a lap of dinted wavelets
flat and calm and iron-grey.
Down at lop and bubbling edge,
birds feed in mixed array:
from stalwart black-headed gulls
to little, flea-like, sanderlings...
and then a flock of knots twisting turbulently
a whirl-swirl-furl-unfurl
along the margin.
Rising up through gravel rakes and eldritch pebbles,
the dunes with their coif of marram,
swallow us into a marram sea -
honking dragon-gestalt
Canada geese
trail ancient language of
sky-written hieroglyphics -
marram waves in slow time:
seasons, years,
unless the pines have any say,
seeded in the lea, in dips,
spreading their stubborn kingdom of stability.
Back along the bank
fat, black seed of Alexanders
in the money.
YOU ARE READING
Under The Wings
Poetry.Under the Wings of the Egyptian and world-wide respected Goddess, Isis. Poems of Nature, Inner Resonance and Mythology.
