A Londoner Remembers the Sea
Islanders away from the sea
say they can't live without it,
its rhythm of beginnings and endings,
a lullaby cradling.
He misses speaking French like that too,
an undercurrent that he never noticed
but which swam under everything.
And he misses how the ugliest weather became
the best frame for the sea, when the
smoky clouds dropped and sky dissolved
in mist, and sea took on all the colours
of dull metals grey and green and,
briefly, he felt heroic, buffeting the wind.
And people in cities don't do this,
hunch into the wind and scuttle along the
high tide mark like crabs, looking for
treasures thrown up by the storm,
a shell perhaps from the Caribbean,
sculpted driftwood, plastic, bone.
He misses being where everything is rounded
and boat-shaped, and he dreams beside a basket
of dried vraic and old rope in an empty flat
well above the high tide mark.
Sometimes the traffic murmurs to him like the sea
as he wonders when the tide will turn.
© Jacqueline Mézec