The tide is out now and also now and
I am leaving footprints in the sand
On Cromer beech;
Other walkers say, ‘Good morning!’
Then drop their heads and hurry past -
No further speech.
One gull hangs sublimely in the air -
Beautiful! -
But by another measure
Getting nowhere fast;
Some peers, more industrious,
Congregate at the shore edge -
Strutting, nodding, self-important,
Clumsy and pedantic,
Both feet on the ground,
As if they had forgotten how to fly and dressed this up as progress;
An enterprising one or two perch amid the waves
On rotting wooden posts
And then me, old fool, pausing
Here now, now there which was here before -
See how words divide, make time and space! -
To take a picture or jot down poetic lines,
Heroic efforts - you think? - to pin it down, to
Arrest this infinitely wild and turbulent scene,
Impose some kind of order on it all?
You know, I’m not so sure that’s how it is,
Not sure these words I leave behind
Are not waves too
Forming rocks and pebbles and grinding all to dust
No final message in a bottle to be deciphered
Only this restless movement
This carrying on
And now always and again the sea arrives in undulations
Collapse-creating white foam hiss
Far from forgetting her many loves
Absorbing all traces into the whole
She sweeps the beech clean with tender, lingering kisses,
Whispering only ‘Yes!’ And ‘Yes!’ again
‘Yes Yes Yes!’
