Emu Point: Bairn of the shallows

Emu Point: Bairn of the shallows

When the high tide falls and runs, hardly noticed, all of it so gentle, with hardly a ripple – the mud flats rest from their movement – except here and there are the domain of long-snouted snails who drift carefree in their guilds – fluting, slipping, sliding as lorries do in peak hour, bumper to bumper with periwinkle and bubbling half-submerged scallop shells, stopping only for streamlined whitebait and whiting.

In this place with mud under her feet, ankle deep mud-skipper, my blond-haired bairn goes careering, sailing past me. And in the blink of an eye my father is twirling his fishing line in giant arcs with his bait-laden hook and sinker, for then I was his blond-haired bairn and he the would be fisher-man, and as I watched him swing and arc his line and bait, so too had a wandering seabird above his head reassigned its fate.

This place of dreams and micro-observations moves as if in slow motion, and speaks with surreal memories of snails underfoot, and of giant-billed pelicans, of preening and dancing gulls and the movement of tides running beyond the bar and returning to the shoreline. This place where my daughter danced and my father caught a gull, this place where some of life’s most poignant moments have cast their spell.

The fishermen’s altar of rock

The fishermen’s altar of rock

When the southern seas are seemingly tame or boiling and the seacoast’s altars of rock and ledge are awash with the periodic king of waves and froth, and fishermen are prepared to risk all, or throw their lot in with the millimetres of hull that separate them from the sky-world of seabirds and the seabed of starfish – at these times their lives would seem held by a thread.
Yet, surely he is a fool who underestimates the sea, for such oceans forgive but few.
When the southern seas are feathering most of us can all but hold our breath.
For the sightseer who beholds the rippling roar of blinking, breaking swells, majestic in their movements beholds too their myriads of cobalt and turquoise, free-falling.
Those with the sight and an ability to predict must know better than to stand in harms way, better to risk less and to walk away.
And what for he or she who knows and trusts in fate alone, or likes to gamble on Poseidon’s throne?
What says he or she to the boiling sea when grasping kelp and weed?
What last images flash before their eyes, but that altar of rock and its safety of lies?

An illogical non-ecological capitalist creed

Frog.

I am a frog who wades through the mess you mask and make
and all the risks you choose to take
I am the embryo through which you prod, dissect and bleed.
I am the measure of your illogical non-ecological capitalist creed...
and I am dying...
And you who choose to remain unaware choose not to care
your profits shall be your snare for as you sleep you’re suffocating me
silent to the frog beyond your window and the disease that stops my breath
we suffocate together you and I and we will oneday wander homeless
into the sky

i WROTE THIS MANY YEARS AGO. HOW IS IT... that an oil rig can leak and BP passes the buck and people speak of a lost economy, lost jobs??? And the Greek economy goes to the wall and they want to inject 120 billion dollars, and yet couldn't decide on what action they needed to take at Copenhagen, because the economy might be affected??? HOW IS IT...frog... ???

Kindling in the Metters: Water in the Pot

Kindling in the Metters

Kindling in the Metters is firing the pot
The steam is rising through the grill
The pot is alive

Who could have thought
that a steaming pot could fire the inspiration
for a steam train, then an airliner
and space ship -

Steam so speaks of invisible thoughts,
of forces born in the embers of wood, water and fire
where air speaks of earth’s strongest desire
that courses
through her veins; higher and higher.