Boundaries

Cornwall’s lovely, a recent holiday proved that to be the case (again).

Staying at a house overlooking a harbour, early mornings watching rain, sun, sea, imagining seagull thoughts, wondering about stuff in general were a true holiday blessing.

Time’s precious, spent well with family but there’s also a little time each day – those moments watching from the window – for spending selfishly.

So I wrote this poem, one morning, watching the inevitable rain.

Hope you like it.

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Boundaries

Rain blurs the horizon, murky opacity

shrouding distance imperceptible, lash talons

curtain-thrash the heather hill across the harbour.

Gulls hacker-love and swopper-kosh the cliff face lash,

dip-flung round the headland, clinging to land’s safety,

seeming wary of the mist-drifting, smash-pounding sea.

Tides dance white horses rockwards, crash-battering

geological brutality – lull-sucking,

repeating, unable to breach land’s bastion.

Ocean’s lust: to roll eternal miles, sine form

wave—swells flex-pumping, pitching at infinity –

coast free, shoreless: endless, unrestricted progress.

Our land is stubborn, though, resisting erosive,

persistent land-lash, ignorant of tide’s intent

to inundate our fertile floodplains, our valleys.

Steadfast bedrock, looming metres, hundreds, even

thousands – above the chasm drowned beneath ice-age

melt water, lying sopping and saturated:

Doggerland – holding evidence of what went once

before, why the legends, why the common stories,

a shared oral tradition, now lost memories.

We sit bounded by mist-blurred horizons, able

to perceive shapes loom-lurking, wondering what lies

beyond, unseen, hoving at perception’s soft edge.

Knowledge cannot osmose across such a membrane,

impenetrable to science, to history,

frustrating our want, conducive to fathoming.