The creek is gouging deeper into the sand
of the beach since slowing groynes have been removed.
Quite noticeably steeper; and low tide waves
smash, rather than lap. The dog crunches stranded urchins.
We walk up the bed of the low tide creek
and back, then go south and observe, restless.
Maybe one hundred and fifty years back,
it was a wooded spit half a mile out
into the bay. We both investigate.
We pass a dead baby seal, its skull scraped
by gulls, the rest of its carcass unbroached.
A puffer fish, distended and untouched.
Then another dead baby seal, eyes intact.
Last night's rough weather, despite the silver back
and Atlantic gulls, milling at the head,
only yards further on. A banjo shark
that had been caught off the beach, fins removed
and carcass left. No wavelets breaking.
A pod of three dolphins languidly working
between reefs, fifty yards offshore, and beach.
A whiting moving only with the water
slapping the sand at the water's edge; eagle ray,
two or three yards off shore, and watching it.
The dog eating the whiting. The ray, foiled,
moves away. And the rain starts; but I turn
to watch the dolphins for some time, wondering
(plagiarised from / collaborated with a bit of a letter from a friend who
lives in south Victoria, Australia
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UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
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