The Latest Wave

Sitting on the concrete outflow which bisects the beach, looking at the tide encroach and the waves breaking, is like watching time. We commonly think of time as a line from A to B, from birth to death, from William the Conqueror to Charles III. It can seem like this as we follow the clock on the factory floor or in the office. Yet even as we do this we dip in and out of another time zone in which thoughts and plans, memories and feelings rise and fall unbidden.

Here, time is cyclical like the waves, moving inexorably through chronological time but all the time overlapping, repeating, retaking themselves. In the waves we see ourselves not as isolated at a point in time, but as belonging to generations and sharing in an ever evolving cycle of existence.

Her Funtime Book

On the white sand, my granddaughter
lying with her Funtime book,
and her mother behind sunglasses reading,
and then her mother under a parasol
dreaming.
I think of my mother paddling in the shallows,
her skirt hitched up.

 In this heat and sleep the tide revolves.
The gull’s steel eye feeds its ancient appetite,
the thrift’s pink again in the sea-wall,
and the white shell lodges
in centuries of rock.

 So I watch this child,
the latest wave lapping her feet,
join up the dots in her Funtime book.

At White Bay

 …the brimming sea
flint-green and the weight of stone
heaves against a rim of bleached sand.

 Above the shivering dunes
wind-driven gulls hone their wings
to silver blades.

 A child among the rockpools
crouches over a mirror of still blue,
sees her own face shining back
and her finger closing in on itself.

 Out in the bay breakers gather and collapse.