Max sounds a good beach -no rattling empty beer cans ?swathes of seas wept
plastic? oil slicks? no needles?
Different from my kind of beach
Cheers Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 11 March 2009 13:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: snap: missing the sea
Missing the Sea
(East Beach, Port Fairy, Victoria)
Living inland has its merits -
quiet, insulation, landmarks,
none of which count for much
once I get back to the sea.
The sun through clouds over East Beach
sets alight a wide gulf of blueness;
bay-wide breakers in formation curl
creaming into surf, foam and spray,
trickle slackening up the flat sands
to tease the morning's dogs.
Their aging humans pause, avoid the wavelets,
send on their dogs' backs their
reawakened early sea-bathing selves
for the lift, the splashings, the scurrying back.
Me, I'm limping, smiling for my one-time
skinny-dipping self, now well-wrapped
whatever the power of the sun.
Today it's promising tanning,
even sunburn, from which I'll retreat.
My hatless years are long gone.
The prints along the beach are
dog-paws, running shoes, bare feet,
birds small and large, horses!
And there they are, two racers,
mounted, returning from exercise
in the shallows, about to mount
the dunes to their waiting trailer.
Their speed and grace rebuke my plod.
Eyes down I mark cuttlefish shards,
bedraggled seabird feathers, broken
shells, and, far from its fellows,
a fairy penguin, cliche of death.
Wherever there is life, come
such endings, unless that kelp,
broken, tossed here by the last storm,
survives deep underwater, renewing
itself constantly. Now, writing,
I'm back inland, where drought
and fire have killed so much,
the salt waste seems almost kinder,
surely lovelier, as my mind's eye
cherishes that morning light
singing its widening way between
the white lighthouse at the river mouth
and the surf-spray-mist
sunlit drifting round
two tiny figures - racehorses
and riders completing their exercise.
Wednesday 11 March 2009
Max Richards
Doncaster, Victoria
------------------------------------------------------------
This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.0.237 / Virus Database: 270.11.10/1994 - Release Date: 03/10/09
19:51:00
|