Border Control 1204-2004
Welcome to this dot-on-the-map, this rock in the sea,
shipwrecked, terra firma, earthed, grounded, cast away.
You have to be ready to live on an island, because
islands just belong to themselves. You may grow strange
like a north coast tree, wind-danced into hunches and curves;
you may start to forget that anywhere else exists.
Water is a clear boundary, no territorial confusion, but
timetables won't restrain weltering waves, the global push
and pulse, whiplashing weather foiling your arrivals, departures.
We've no more natural rights here than the plants and fauna,
and birds don't worry about immigration controls;
if they have wings to fly then this can be home.
Welcome to the big field; nothing here is cheap: earth, water,
grass.
Soon the lanes will beguile you, stealing your sense of distance
in this patchworking of fiefs, of farms, this big village;
faces will become known-unknown and all your relationships
be bounded by this hemming in, cocooned in valleys of dappling
and green, a witchery of wild fragrances and warm fusty ground.
The beaches belong to everyone, beaches are classless,
this view towards blue unchanging through centuries.
Here you can feel clear and pure, cured of possessions,
the shore a blank paper washed clean by each watercolour tide,
with never quite the same scribblings of seaweed, of sand graffiti,
and abstract friezes of strafed driftwood, sea-pummelled shells.
You will start to see like an artist, noting that the palette
of
sky and sea are different each evening; how sun catches wave
in a quicksilver flash; how, seen from the right angle, the bay
hugs round you, a circle linked by castle and harbour and fort,
the restrained beauty of granite blocks locked close,
and how all shapes arc to the ocean's curve, the big picture.
Everything leads to the sea: streams, valleys, walks,
and you may dream of bridges and tunnels and boats, but the
sea gives you food and gifts and you would miss it, washed up
in a city, wondering if the tide were coming in or going out,
picturing fishers tailing the sheen of the low-water line and
growers ploughing the spine of a côtil, canopied by gulls.
Enjoy this rhythm of to and fro, where everything is
rounded and smoothed, the beat of ebb and flow, the riff
of wave on wave, this drifting choral movement; you can come
and go, arrive and leave, and the sea will speak all languages,
a tidal crooning, seductive, amniotic, invoking, hypnotic,
a slippery grammar summoning you back to the island.
© Jacqueline Mézec
(This poem was commissioned in 2004 by the Jersey Evening Post for its Our Island series)