Carne

The sand is strewn with sea-weed shapes
that gently move with tide’s continual sway —
inscrutable, like Japanese calligraphy.
Rock-pools fill and swirl, then drain,
then fill again each day.
Baby crabs lie upside down in sand,
salt-spattered by the spray.
No sound, no sound at all, but solitary high gull-cry,
the rush and wash of waves on shingle, stone and scree.
Ocean is too big a word to use, too large a thing to see.
My eye moves out from this secluded bay
to a horizon that is much too far away.
No sight, no sight at all this way
but blue on blue on blue and a vague distant thread of grey.
My thoughts will not stay still —
how restlessly they divigate and splay.
I am dwarfed, humbled, chastened, scattered —
even by this little slip of sea.