URGENT MORNING FEET
11th July 2020
Urgent morning feet, sandal-gritting seawards:
Pineapple-weed-sweetened strides
Through grass dews clustering bright as new-hot stars,
Spectrum-flashing to intrigue the eye…
And here’s the ever-beckoning Atlantic!
Across the sound, Skokholm’s buildings stare lime-shiny;
She, underlined whitely by the kicky spuffs
Of a silent-passing buzzy sort of boat.
The Sands, in this now, a half completed jigsaw
Of sun-glares and cloud shadows;
The sea, clear enough to glow a bottly almost-turquoise
Which seems so jewelly crystalline when distancing
The purply softpuff powder blue of new-burst pathside scabious.
Not first to print the sand today;
But we know who was: an early swimmer,
And they’re now home for breakfast.
Having resisted our muscles’ magnetic draw
Towards an immediate fling-in swim,
Haste now for the shore’s far end,
Leaving this new high tide line for later;
For we and friend Ocean both know her tabled obligation–
And more three hours since end of ebb!
This morning’s waves roll orderly,
To a Brahms rhythm, you might say –
No frighten-the-white-horses surprises:
Unlike the thunderstorm thumpers of some days back,
They creep the froth line steadily up
Without any sprint-to-keep-your-socks-dry surges
Which squeaked last Sunday’s farm-raised sisters
To pink-cheeked gaspy scampers.
Across the boulders carefully slow,
Unreached by drying sunshine yet:
We know, we know, we know –
It is good to nag ourselves that,
Of all this morning’s anywheres,
Here’s the likeliest for trips and tricky slips.
Now for rapid perusal of this southern stretch tideline –
Inkling its preferences for the where-to-cast-up
Of different sorts of seaborne things.
Today, no time for stovewood or garden-feeding seaweed;
Instead, Neptune’s perpetual conundrum:
What purpose ever serves a solo shoe?
But a onetime tool-worked timber,
Part painted and part all-abraded off,
And then a birder’s belt-looped binocular pouch:
One bodes creative, and the latter might handily
Carry a sketchbook quick within one’s reach!
Here, more curiously, a string-strung broken bottleneck
Which our sentiments wish to have humbly launched
A superstitious ship, press-ganged into the tradition
By the sailor’s eternal awe of ancient lores.
The beach’s end: now, back along the higher line
Which, though it’s older, still might yield us
Prizes others have not seen –
Or, more’s the point, they saw but did not notice.
(As every proper comber will surely never tell
For fear that you get better,
You really need to cultivate an eye!)
Ever being the best sign,
Here stretches unfootprinted a wavering weedy strew:
It yields us traditional tennis balls,
And the strong long lines we’d hoped for –
Our broad beans soon wanting more staunch support.
Satisfied, now, our scramble back…
Tidelines well walked, aught useful found!
Undeniable, our combing’s compulsion –
But, in our defence,
Anything manmade taken means a beach left better for Nature.
© Christopher Jessop 2020
