Low Tide

Imagine it,
you wake up one morning and find that the sea has gone,
not just ebbed.
Some tidal mania, unannounced, has bared
a plateau of rock and seaweed to the stony horizon, alien,
terra incognita.

Everywhere is still wet, but the rising sun is
burning off the water in steam as you set out to explore,
grabbing your wellingtons,
ahead of plangent gulls and archaeologists
and the last lighthouse keeper.

You stumble over neon strawberry and jewel anemones,
berried sea squirts,
raggle-headed rubbery jellies
gossamer finned in bridal array, with
mother-of-the-bride coloured corals;
an elephant's ear sponge,
an explosion of finny skeleton hands,
framed in kelp and whip weed;
electric yellow fish, an undulate ray, and in
pools cerulean, inky, fathoms deep,
great uncharted sea creatures lurk,
evidenced by a flick of tail out of
the corner of your eye, a cough and splutter of bubbles.

In the distance the island looks green and very tiny as
you wander further and further away from it, through
slippery valleys of stone, feeling some grief for
the stranded starfish and shy hippocampus.
Perhaps you find the splintered shards of a ship,
the polished bones of a fish or a sailor drowned at sea,
or the domestic debris of Atlantis?

You know that a tidal wave must be coming,
that whatever monster sucked all the water
from this channel must be due to spit it all back out,
but you want to explore this virgin world just a little,
confident that you can swim back to the island,
if the worst happens.

Then it is only a few miles to the coast of France,
and the lights flickering on the shore,
as you emerge, heroic, to a welcoming crowd.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem was first published in the Jersey Evening Post as part of a winning entry in the Jersey Evening Post Writing Competition of 1998)

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