Blacksmith-Poet

My daughter's six years-old. Last Saturday
we went to Cowey Sale to feed the birds.
We stood there with our bags of bread.
A swan approached, a full-grown cob,
ungainly, lordly, every inch as tall as her.
He stretched, and spread his wings – I felt their waft.
She never flinched, she held her ground.
She fed him titbits from the bag. I felt so proud.
We stood there on the Surrey bank
and stared along the Thames to Walton Bridge.
“What do you see?” I asked her. And she said:
“A bow, a metal rainbow with its feet touching the earth.”
I smiled; she said: “When we get home tonight
I want to stay up late and watch the Stars on Ice.”

One day, perhaps this year, we'll walk across that bridge.
We'll cross, as so many have crossed before:
its span of wood and stone and brick
remade in steel – the girders braced and tensioned,
tempered to withstand the shock of centuries to come.
I'll lean against the parapet, ask her what the future holds.
She gestures to the bridge's end. “I want to dance,”
she says. I tell her: “Sweetheart, you already do.”
She thinks I'm teasing her. I'm not.
With every step she takes she makes the world anew.

I live with my sister in the summer-caves.
Reflected light of ocean whispers on the rocks.
We lie in each other’s arms and look up at the light.
All my life it has been like this –
I honour what is changeful,
hold my balance while the world eddies round me.
I am the still point, the calm to which the sea returns
from wave and storm.
My eyes are its blue, and cold and clear as ocean.
My thoughts break the surface like porpoise.

A boy came to us, an immortal.
We think that one day he will be a king.
He tells us that he fell from heaven
and we smile and soothe his babbling.
I put him to my breast and he sucks like a seal-pup.
He drains me and it is exquisite.
Milk spills and runs between my breasts,
it crusts on my belly, cracks as I stretch.
He coils his fingers in my hair and tugs.
The veins beat at his temples,
blue beneath his cap of hair.
His rage is monstrous, undeniable.
He beats into our stillness and slowly
his anger ceases. He is calm.

As a child I watched
the peel and splinter of slate
as you picked in the cliff face
for fossils.

Something beautiful about the coils
that you dislodged, their corrugations
clenched across millennia,
stranded in a sea-bed turned to rock
that reared above the crust we stood on.

Something fantastical, even then,
about the sense you made of time,
the gaps it spanned
and their inversion
of the solid and the liquid things.

And something precious in that shore
whose gold grain ran a thread
between the old sea and the new,
the stone sea and the wind-ruffed
restless charge of water-onto-land.

You lent me your hammer to play with:
its weight in my hand, the swing of it
too large; its bounce and skew discarded,
abandoned on a rock.

Back at the car your anger rushed like water,
gathered the horizon to itself and took me,
rolled me over, spun the world –
left me battered, breathless, still as stone.

And I remember how you ran,
with no thought but the hammer,
back across the beach to beat the tide,
your footsteps flailing in the sand.