To Rex Hobcroft <br />Wind crosshatches shallow water. <br />Paddocks rest in the sea's arm. <br />Swamphens race through spiky grass. <br />A wire fence leans, a crazy stave <br />with sticks for barlines, wind for song. <br />Over use, interweaving light <br />with air and substance, ride the gulls. <br /> <br />Words in our undemanding speech <br />hover and blend with things observed. <br />Syllables flow in the tide's pulse. <br />My earliest memory turns in air: <br />Eclipse. Cocks crow, as if at sunset; <br />Grandmother, holding a smoked glass, <br />says to me, 'Look. Remember this.' <br /> <br />Over the goldbrown sand my children <br />run in the wind. The sky's immense <br />with spring's new radiance. Far from here, <br />lying close to the final darkness, <br />a great-grandmother lives and suffers, <br />still praising life: another morning <br />on earth, cockcrow and changing light. <br /> <br />Over the skeleton of thought <br />mind builds a skin of human texture. <br />The eye's [art of another eye <br />that guides it through the maze of light. <br />A line becomes a firm horizon. <br />All's as it was in the beginning.<br /><br />Gwen Harwood<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/estuary-2/
