Miilba Estuary, Good Friday
The showers have moved on, families are at play,
the school holidays have begun, enmeshed in a story
drilled into me, of a Jew being whipped, mocked
then crucified, and though excruciating, prophets
have peddled too many dreams and nightmares.
And I’ve just renounced chocolate in the hope
of losing body mass while gaining health
and finding Fairtrade hard to get to grips with.
The promise of hot cross buns arrives, Alan opens
the bonnet and reveals the engine toasting them,
a mother and two naked children splash the shore.
I have to be careful where I point the camera,
so swing to innocence, the colours of Strelitzia
and Buttercups, an excavator and front-end loader
overturned, a wheel loader half submerged.
Remodelled yet again, the fifty-metre stretch
of beach is pared back to a low-head barrage,
slim bank of sand funneling a slender channel
to sustain the resurrected lagoon. We extracted
the trash from last week’s flood just in time.
The sea shifts more earth than we can anticipate
early toys – bones, stones, sticks and sand
with clay are the flesh that dresses our bodies.
How simple artificial plastic can seem, innocent
and beautiful like the clouds’ glistening reflections.
