Snap

What if the wave were to stop
just as it is, snap-frozen?

What if the blowsy wave flowers stopped,
a rip in the valance, each fine blue stitch
and still holding its silver needle?

What if the sea did indeed stop
and all the vegetable armies, the grasses,
mad bunches on the stony dike,

the lupins, their heavy perfume stopped,
the starfish, pale asterisk on the stony page,
the polyps stopped, their strange juices frozen?

What if the gulls and all the terns all stopped
and the tiny black swallows
that zip up and down the midnight lagoon?

What if the sun itself were to stop,
no longer rinsing blue from the loveliest ice chamber?

Then we would be the wonders here,
like the seals, little fallen angels in the dry valley.
The bones in our hands smoothed
like long white gloves, our fine pelt wind-dried,
gravel in our brain pans and our eyes.

-- Bernadette Hall, New Zealand teacher and poet, from Fancy Dancing, 2020