You’d think, from the first few entries in this journal, that I was fixated on seaweed; not so. It’s just that wherever I go I take a pocket recorder to capture ideas, and often poems come to me while I’m out. And this afternoon the rain eased, so I grasped the opportunity…
WET DAY WEEDRAKER
Self-cautioned,
With deliberating downstare to climb the roughcut first of the black steps,
These still glossed from the sea’s so recent departure;
Thus, slowly away from low tide’s hushed whitecrumples.
All to myself, I’ve had the beach, for my
Jinking trawl of its shower-pitted sand –
Bucket in left hand, stone rake in right,
Hooking rips of searibbon and greenbobble wrack
For every of my growing rows:
The work so easy today when, also, kelp strews
In leathergleam profusion.
Everso wary now across the intertidal,
Rake handle held imminent for steadying;
For, already seasmoothed and silkweeded slick,
The rain’s wet so tantamounts this rock treacherous,
I owe it as much untrust as I’d accord an oil spill.
The stream’s millennial rock-cut crossed, I pause…
Out from shore this afternoon,
No wheelswoop and Ka-kash! of gannets.
Instead, a razorbill quartet, stubby beaked and rivertug dumpy:
They flipatip under nearly synchronised;
But it’s random how they cork back up
After long and, I hope, profitable clearwater breathholds.
How clear now across the cove and beyond,
With the Howney brightening colours fast:
I, thanks to age, know to wry these signs – more rain due soon!
Thus, anticipating myriad kittens-on-tiptoe droplets
All about my years-worn hat brim,
On again up, well payloaded boots britting each barnacled step…
Mind now fixated on a gerundive mug of tea which Must Be Drunk.