4th October 2021
What spirit whispered me awake
At a quarter past two, just in time for low tide?
Gaps in the old skylight blind spill moonsilver down the wall,
And I tilt it to find the garden lying intrigued by mist:
I will, as usual, brew night tea –
But only once I’ve swum.
Well before I reach the field
The diction of each wavebreak carries so amphitheatre clear,
I even hear small cliff-foot backwashes
Plashing pointy with incomers.
Three ships, anchored to their reflections:
Two glow oil lantern yellow; one starks electronic white.
Stubbly air still harvest-tasting, barley not long left;
But these hedges bitter the night,
For a thoughtless land manager just diesel-slashed them hard:
A Chemicals Man who has no spreadsheet columns
For the birds and insects they’d have fed all Autumn –
Bad enough that farming the most money
Means cultivating grant forms
Which he plants out, hectare by hectare,
With lies about his care of Nature.
The stream, still dry
After months of profit-pushing pond pumping:
Not yet revived, despite September rain.
Dark storm-sculpt rocks,
Still heartly warmed this week:
Slow, me, across where they’re foot-worn slipgreasy,
And cautious onto the sand –
Which I find straight lined by purposeful pads:
Reynard, I suspect, off for the beach’s north end
To spring low snout that rarer tideline.
Ah! Worth coming out, if only to see this –
Half mile up the coast, apparently a Niagara of slow steam,
Silent but vast:
The overcliff pour of mists from the next stream valley.
The day’s ragged breeze-surf, dispersed: a wade out
Into silent glassfolds
Which whitelush ashore so crisply.
Unlike my previous, no phosphorescence
As out I swim until toe-tip-touch,
The Irish sea at my chin
Hushly ship-hummed,
Startlingly clear…
And here’s why I had to come.
So I could dive down-moon,
Chase my flexing shadow across rumpled sand
Then twist over for bare eyes to know
A Moon under water so unlike the dizzledance Sun:
A staring coin, of enough enchant
For any mermaid tale-teller to romance whole chapters.
I let backstroking wavelets wash me ashore,
Mind already busy with lines, with rhymes;
Then because, despite the clammy cliffbrow mist,
This night’s strand’s so mild,
Maybe like the wild child of some story
In sand circles I run myself dry –
Loving how well my not-so-young toes still flex,
Surprised at my lungs’ ease under the moon, loop after loop…
Musing that if, a half century ago,
At school we’d barefooted smooth sea sand
Instead of thin-plimsoll jolting petrol-leaded pavements,
For all my gangles I might have run quite well.
After the homeward honeysuckle steep
– Always to be dark-dawdled –
I find the night changed:
Sky more milky, though still Orion-glittered,
Mist mostly dispersed…
And, up the brighted path,
Stick to steady against dipshadows,
I think back to pilgrims, pedlars, poets too:
Of course all had kept stepping on, any night like this –
When walking the calmful silence is something magified,
With pathfinder heavenbrights for company
Whether on through treetrench lanes, or up and over high downs.
© Christopher Jessop 2021
