I dreamed a gallop across sand
in and out the scallop of the tide
on a colourless horse as cold as a seal.
My hair and the mane of the horse
are the long white manes of the sea.
Every breath is a gulp of salt.
Now we are ocean. His hoof-prints
are pools, his quivering skin
the silk in the trough of the wave.
His muscular ellipses are
the sinuous long water of the sea
and I swim with the waves in my arms.
by Gillian Clarke
from New Poems
She dips her bill in the rim of the sea.
Her beak is the ellipse
of a world much smaller
than that far section of the sea’s
circumference. A curve enough to calculate
the field’s circle and its heart
of eggs in the cold grass.
All day while I scythed my territory
out of nettles, laid claim to my cantref,
she has cut her share of sky. Her song bubbles
long as a plane trail from her savage mouth.
I clean the blade with newspaper. Dusk blurs
circle within circle till there’s nothing left
but the egg pulsing in the dark against her ribs.
For each of us the possessed space contracts
to the nest’s heat, the blood’s small cicuit.
by Gillian Clarke
from The Sundial (Gwasg Gomer, 1978)
Fun fact: A cantref was a medieval Welsh land division, particularly important in the administration of Welsh law.
Rambling At The Bridge Head 