Inspired by a recent night swim.
I hope John Meade Faulkner doesn’t mind me adapting the title of his novel;
If you haven’t read Moonfleet, DO!
6th September 2020
If this really happened, if we didn’t sleep it,
It was surely because our much-loved teacher
Had said in a long-past lesson we would never forget,
‘Imagine, in previous centuries,
Children your age in coastal villages like this
Being roused by their parents, dressed fast,
And rushed outside to witness a moonlit squadron
Of Men of War driving up-channel, every sail set:
“You might never see the like, again!”.’
So many of them, sailing in from the Western Approaches that night:
Galleon clouds, fully canvassed with wind astern.
On they drove, on up the Bristol Channel with,
Already sighted far ahead from way up there,
Shining silvered miles of low tide Severn strands.
On across England they’d go, we knew,
Majesties of Atlantic weather,
Before this steady south-westerly:
Upstreaming the Warwick Avon, crossing the Midland watershed,
Following Welland lowlands out to The Wash and beyond.
We friends were seeing them, only smallhours whispers shared,
Because separately the moon had woken each of us;
And, simplywarmly dressed, stealthily all outside and up the lane
To properly honour these magnificent clouds,
Marvel their sky-wide flight from our open country…
…And, easy walk on that bright night,
From the swell-washed cove, favourite place to play,
Where
– Who dared first? –
We all must swim the barleyharvest moon.
Encrushingly foam-speeded shorewards
Time and again in warm summer waves,
Doubleglittered by moonsparkle and green sea-glims;
Afterwards, to dry, running so fast like bay-spread ships,
Naked shadows our ink-dark bow-waves,
Across the desert-sparse beauty of that empty sand.
Homeward, sauntering beside the first hissing spreads of the sea’s return,
Our upfacing eyes were starred with Northern awe;
And our sometimes tip-touching fingers
Traced for each other mysterious shapes in high, high clouds
So fairy-faint with lacy intricacy.
Gazing back southwards, just in time to witness
A flotilla of first-rater cumuli
Cusping misty topsails
Through Selene’s beam,
Ambering it with prismed fringes.
Such tentative homeward hand-holds
In case, we whispered, of muddyshadow slips;
So taste-full, moon-picked blackberries –
The only touch of lips,
Us gigglily feeding each other.
So complex, by then, to our night-accustomed eyes,
That weather-changing sky!
Different clouds arriving above those galleons:
Patterned like beach ripples,
Far faster progressing in their thinner atmosphere.
Though we strode the long meadow
At our after-swimming bloodrousing speed
They slipped from south-west to pass above, beyond;
And, come our reluctant dreampinchless partings,
Had covered all the county with their rumplous Veil of Tomorrow.
© Christopher Jessop 2020
