Gently, I walk the water's edge

The rugged coast where the rocks about the headland are revealed at low tide tempts the walker to explore; it offers virgin sand, a challenging path and a sense of man against nature.

Gently, I walk the water's edge

 

To judge each step without a fall

That will break your neck

Is a great skill

Many of us possess

It puts a mind, one’s mind, in the moment

It is survival, instinct

Knowing that death is a possibility and yet

Proceeding because

I am the controller of my destiny

Each step is a success, an affirmation

Both omnipresent and insignificant

I am the knowing and the unknown

 

And all the while the water

Gently laps over the moulded basin

Age old rocks full of valleys and mountains

A small scale version of our own land masses

Our countries, our civilization

And gently it is carved

Easing over the surface

Rock pools link, streams flow

Ponds and lakes form, slowly

 

Not yet have I made it around the headland

I am still choosing my path

Making sure each boulder is sturdy

Rocking on one foot to another, leaping

If the step cannot be made in a walk

Sometimes confident, bounding

Seaweed and algae waiting in slippery defiance

 

The greenery of the flow is swept away now

Kelp kept flat, once languorous now waving, vibrant

Bubbled weeds form nets in the clear liquid

For it is so transparent here, in the Atlantic

 

Gently lapping, I am the hare leaping

It is the flow, once the ebb, now the tortoise

Returning slow, crawling, creeping, a blanket

I find another way, higher

Away from the stroking, the caressing

The sea calling me in

Feel my power, she says, as two thousand tonne tankers

Merely float calmly by like shadow puppetry on the horizon

 

The rocks are surrounded now, tenderness quite broken

Slapping and spitting, telling a tale of ancient pain

The beach subsumed before my eyes

Sand once surface, now floor

Clarity drawn invisibly here

Imperceptible it was to me

 

I am currently wading knee deep

And stones that were once friends are jagged

Leg breaking scars, remnants of the Fried Earth

Thigh deep now, detecting the under-tow

While, in the visible, ridden white horses climb

Manes salty and frothy, furry to my lips

I will make the beach

 

At last a level playing field beneath my feet

But the Ocean still beckons me

The undercurrent tempts but I swim against

I crave the shore, the houses, civilization

The land masses raised, ejected from the molten core

Of antiquity and before

 

I reach another depth; my feet do not feel the sand

I have to rest, to drift, towards the skyline

Where the tankers are floating by

Seabirds screech where my hands lay

Grabbing a guiding buoy, another gull

Another, another, the dry hum of a trawler passing by

 

I am rescued by fishermen who are

Not surprised by their human catch

Another land-lubber

Chancing their arm to beat the tide

As they walk around the headland rocks

Challenging the gentle lapping of the advancing waves

Fighting the inevitability of death

But on this occasion

Given a second chance

 

Others sank, eyes open, lungs full

One last dreaming, a marine walkabout

Maybe I have an envy of that finality

That slow fade, but I gently walk

The water’s edge, my time not yet up

 

My lover is waiting on the shore, hot chocolate in a flask

Hands to hold forever and

Stars to watch come out at night

I feel both the insignificance and the acuity

The danger and the safety

I am the navigator of the journey

On the edge, and so alive to the task

Author's Note

Published in the anthology THE POETIC BOND II, this is one of Trevor Maynard's few poems not to appear in his own collections. The poet wrote the poem in his old moleskin journal, sat among the rocks, but fortunately made it out before the tide made it in. It is a poem of man in nature, and of Nature.