At One with the Waves

the last time i saw you

you were riding in from an Atlantic horizon

all swell with nettle-green underbelly

rising and rolling in a fifty mile frontier

of heaving pewtery insistence

i saw you churning a tiny part of your self

into foam-smash energy

on that innominate granite island

that en dash in this desolated bay’s sentence

now salted by your dessicate coconut spray

my meditation on you started then

that moment when you angled south towards my cliff edge

barrelling beyond Rhum’s bold Cuillins

and Eigg’s serrated wedge of a Sgurr

your approach delivered even more than it promised

you became my concentration

the fibre of my fixation

your perfect arc-parallel with your comrades

swept my mind as clear as each moment of letting go

as calm as helplessness in giving up hope

those minutes that it took you to break

rinsed me to perfection of cleansed being

for once my mind was not elsewhere

it paced with your rhythm and swam naked

into non-meaning along with your cool lava on warm sand

and now i look again

surely that is you once again

engorging again on that Atlantic horizon

draw me into your surging belly again

fill me with emptiness again  

Ted Eames, 2022

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