OUR FIRST NIGHT SWIM
6th August 2020
Initial composition captured on the pocket recorder going to/returning from this year’s first night swim. Admittedly, more of a short story in verse – but when The Muse is having a good Dies your rule must be, Carpe all she gives you!
The year we’re at last deemed old enough
To take ourselves by train to stay with Aunty Seaside…
Astonishing, as a mild darkness ends a beach-baking day,
To be told by the Coastal Cousins at already prevaricated pyjama-time,
‘Change into short shorts and warmest sweaters, get your towels!’
Off along the lane, quickly quiet (that’s The Rule),
While the moon and clouds play Paint and Brushes:
The one dashing cool silver down,
The others blocking out with a bruisy blue.
Now, properly away from the village lights,
We wow to see the sky as God-sized rolling scenery:
A silently passing piece-gapped jigsaw,
Dark and light rare with peeping stars
Until comes castle-summited cumulus, breaking wider for a while.
Oystercatchers peep the distance, faintly water-echoed;
From unseen foot of cliff, the sea’s crumping sighs
Tell of lively waves we’re wasting…
Ticking crickets time our now yet faster hurry down the path,
Scented malty by still-warm earth in the newly planted field.
Over the stream bed, where ghostly moths whisper mossy secrets.
Past scratchy blackthorn which we hear breathing the breeze…
Almost owly now, our eyesight; and anyway
The clover-sweet descent here is dust-worn bright by summer’s feet.
Progress would be silent, but for
The wellies we’re clumbering: some dog owners don’t care.
…
For us, a Never Before!
Moongloom helping us, unused, to be less shy,
Holding hands against sand-dips, we strongstride our skins
Into the larrumphing surf, above which
Flashes the far lighthouse, glims an anchored ship.
… And this, the cousins joy-share with us,
Is why we expeditioned out tonight:
Although it’s sparse, it’s there –
The first phosphorescence of the summer.
Our starfish fingers sparkle greenwhite
As we wrist-whisk the water;
Mumblewondering the glowy pearlstring bow-waves around our deepening tums
We have to snigger, each to all, ‘Well, you’re a twinklebum too!’
Modesty apart, we’re glad now that the Moon stays hidden,
Because under her near-full silver smile
These fairy waterglimmers wouldn’t have shown.
Now, to try and bodysurf the dark!
For us, so elated to be here
And in on this innocent bedtime-defying naughtiness,
Reading the night sea is such a giggly difficulty that
We’re happy at first to just bash and bosh about,
Together breasting waves which seem to come quite unannounced –
Or, arm in arm, ducking under the big ones
To wide-eye oggle that swirly undarkness
Where flukiness fires off herethere sparks.
But, knowing all along that waves should not be wasted,
We move ever cousin-closer to study their success…
And, after some saltsplutter tries – quite a few, it takes! –
We start to acquaint this special night-skill,
Judging each darkling rush for good potential as a breaker;
And, once we’ve learned to read the water’s stealth –
Such a feeling: what specialness!
We, now nature creatures of the night, suddenly delightfully at home
In this sloshwash fish-splashed saltosphere which heretofore wasn’t ours!
Furthermore each of us, with Luck Beyond Diamonds,
Is watching that one rearing silent olive-dark wall
When, just before breaking, its crest allalong greengleams:
A whipflicker, comegone shootingstar fast.
And, coincidence beyond possibility, its roll then catches us all:
Whooping, we catapult shorewards as if train-grabbed,
Momentum scuppering us unbelievably far,
To skid our last goose-pimpled yards on what seem mere veneers of foam –
That must have been, we know it, this night’s Last Firework.
The girls say, once towels are busying friction,
That that wave looked suddenly tiara-topped;
It had momentarily, the tomboys maintain, turned electric or atomic…
Argument curtailed by the cousins’ thereandthen dare:
All must run a full loop of the low tide sand.
Thus it is that, when apogee-furthest from our clothes
And going free and fast as ancient Olympians,
A cloud-break beglares that great prehistoric arena
Where, each sunny summerday,
So many children game their seaside plays.
There we are, tiptoe tiffing moonbare –
And the dark-haired coastal cousins who,
We now can and do believe it,
Betchawon’t each other into every month’s ocean,
Seem seaweed-tressed, prettily mystical
As oldpainting waternymphs.
© Christopher Jessop 2020