We spend a bit of time on the beautiful unspoilt coastline of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. This poem sees the canvas of the beach as a story; the sand, seaweed and pebbles as a kind of mysterious vocabulary.




First published in Text and later in my first full collection micromacro (2006 – out of print)



The music Eyes Open is by Gurdonark whose compositions always seem to be beautiful and mysterious to me, like so many aspects of the natural world.


vocabulary of the beach



this alphabet of pebbles
shells
seaweed
each morning
each tide
a recombinant story

a subtle language
infinite narrative from a
finite vocabulary

telling the old story each day
another way



today an almost
blank page. a feathery weed
brushes a haiku



After the storm a cyrillic of bleached Posidonia

Sumi-e black seagrass on whitepapered sand



Chats leave their own story in cuneiform


everyday
The mystery
explained

the rosetta stone,

undiscovered.