Tag: oceans

The other

~ windinmywheels ~ 7 Comments
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There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake, listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village, that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

R S Thomas (link)
From Destinations, 1985
Collected Poems

Sometimes, in the ‘timeless moments’ of life, particular poets re-enter my heart and mind as counsel and comfort within a season. The late and deeply present R S Thomas has long told of the rising and falling of life’s great ocean, but also of the ‘nights that are so still’ – of an eternal calm. Images of such a calm have been beamed around the globe in recent days, and ears bend to hear the reassuring sound of kind wind – as the Scottish love song* has it – ‘like a bird on the wing’ across water.

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* The Skye Boat Song, Sir Harold Edwin Boulton

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Minerals

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Last evening’s glorious skies were apparently bearing Saharan dust – bringing out brooms and dustpans all over Europe. As my mother would say: ‘I googled it up’ – mindful that ‘there are more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars in the night sky’ – and had my eyes opened further, enough to learn that some of the said dust will feed plankton in the oceans into which it drops, and some will fertilize the Amazon rain forest with minerals not found elsewhere. And I am awed, again, by the immense and astonishing brilliance of our planet’s ecosystems.

The 10th

~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments
J and R 💕

Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living Child,
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome Wild.

O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.

William Wordsworth
The Ballad of Lucy Gray

In sunny Funchal, Madeira, I’m thinking today, of course, of my beloved old Dad on what would have been his 90th birthday; he’d memorised all 16 stanzas of ‘Lucy Gray’ as a young teenager and his reciting the great poem for my late wife and I, word perfect, not long before he (and soon after, she) died, four years ago, is among my dearest memories. My parents’ enthusiasm for sailing oceans is with me now every day as I have followed suit – and it was a great joy to have my mother with me when, during a Mediterranean tour, we visited many of the holiday favourites of their early married years.

Oe’r rough and smooth we all trip along – and though, of course, we’re sometimes singing our ‘solitary’ song, and memory’s tears well in our eyes, still, in our hearts, our loved ones abide 💕

For all that has been, thanks
For all that will be, yes!

Dag Hammarskjöld