We went with family on a boat trip from St Justinian, near St David’s in West Wales, to circumnavigate Ramsey Island, a bird sanctuary with enormous cliffs and large settlements of seabirds, including kittiwakes and guillemots, and sheltered inlets where the seals come to pup in great numbers in the breeding season. The seals, like this one, pop up to look at the boats. I don’t speak Welsh but know how to pronounce it and I love the sound of the language and learn a few words from the traffic signs. These felt a fitting start for a poem.
Sea Riders
Araf
araf
araf nawr
slow
slow
slow down now.
Stand … stop … before this wide
blue-green expanse of ocean.
Sefwch yma
wait here, stop
at the edge,
until you feel
the rolling rhythm of the tides,
these returning cosmic cycles
that nothing interrupts,
these rolling rhythms that mould us
soul deep.
Foot falling in the sand,
feel the salt lick of the
running wave.
Listen to the
mounting roar and sink
of incoming swell,
the withdrawing rattle of sliding
shingle.
Watch the dipping wing
of kittiwake and guillemot
tumbling among these dark
and massy cliffs,
where seals sing in hidden
clefts, dolphins dive, and the air
stings,
sharp against you mouth,
gaping and amazed before this
ocean mystery.
Ignore the man-made clouds that
stripe the sky,
dropping steely rods of rain,
deploying drought,
like armaments, displacing
the habitual patterns of
wind and weather: sorcerer’s
apprentice stuff this, which
we are bound to drown in,
when fear takes over,
feeding on surface insecurity.
But no.
Ar agor.
Open,
we are open,
open for business
with a deeper magic,
allied
to the unstoppable rhythm
of the tides.
We are sea riders,
riders of the deep.
© Jehanne Mehta 31 July 2013
Jehanne is one of the contributors to Soul of the Earth: the Awen anthology of eco-spiritual poetry edited by Jay Ramsay.
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