Looking West, Late Afternoon, Low Water

The typical tidal range, or difference in sea level between high and low tides, in the open ocean is about 2 ft (0.6 m), but it is much greater near the coasts.—Desk encyclopaedia


Our beach was never so bare. Freak tide,
system fault, inhuman error, will it

never stop falling? After dark, said
the tables of high water and sunset

pasted on the wall, which don’t deceive.
Come on down for a walk while there’s light.

A wall of pale green glass miles above
head high alongside, complete with fish

crossing, is what will have been the wave
once it has broken. Leviathan is

the beached cachalot we left Bob Falla
filleting for science, the ebb to wash

away these fifty years, each one smaller
than the last. Come down, this is today

delivered factory fresh, in colour
heated by the late sun. Time to try

looking on the bright side, or join those
Great God! (says the poem) who’d rather be

suckled in a creed outworn: but whose
cast-off cult’s to be the lucky one?

Great waters, unfinished business, done
blind to the deadline. From that rock, to

this tree was tapu and it sticks. Thin
pickings, Tangaroa, this is pakeha

story time, only Okeanos and
sister Tethys having it off; the way

they love makes hairy cliff-hanging seas
roll drums on the sand, the 3-metre swell

flat on the seabed bangs the pubes,
very ancient and fishlike they smell

close to. Divine all the same. Dangerous,
not to be approached, least of all by

mortal man whose years are four-score plus
tomorrow night. While I count the three

strong swimmers carried past out of sight
round the North Rocks the whole shoreline shakes

underfoot again, dead friends call out
not to be heard. Look west, what looks

back is blood-orange nightfall, the stooped
sky drowning another sun overboard

where the horizon was: till it snapped
those deep-sea moorings and will be heard

oncoming, the sound of a scream, tsunami!
tsunami! splintering deadwood of the boat

I lost half a life ago, swept
away with a judgment on the work

she’s amateur built but your friends won’t know.
Last seen, one inflatable rescue

craft stood on its tuck, bows to skyward
in fast failing light, a turning tide.




-- Allan Curnow (1911-2001), New Zealand poet, teacher, and reporter.

Tangaroa Nui

Last night I dreamed again of tides,
not those tides rocking soundlessly
in caves that shuffle old men off
in their extremity, but those inner
tides that have their source in dreams
where my father, astride the passage,
reins them in with outstretched hands …
I saw again the tides plunging
in harness, sea and sky boiling
together, and myself a child flipped
high into the air by a dolphin,
to float down softly as a feather
past my father’s smiling eyes, past
the wheeling seabirds, to settle
on the sand and fall fast asleep
with the tide beating in my ears
as surely as the heart of him
who checks the pulse and flow of things
and holds time in his hands.


-- Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925-2009), New Zealand poet of Cook Islands and Pakeha ancestry

Tangaroa is the god of the sea.

Image: surf at Napier, Hawke Bay

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

Sea Changes

Strange times have taken hold on me,
strange seas have locked across my eyes,
thick in the twilight undersea
unheard-of-silence heard these cries.

Out of the glimmer of green waters
the ringing deafness of dark seas,
such dim-begotten sons and daughters
of love and cold flesh death are these:

Uncertain are they hunting on
and all their faith’s inconstancy;
they are who touch and straight are gone
yet have no other where to be.

--Allen Curnow (1911-2001) New Zealand poet and reporter, from Valley of Decision, 1933

Shoring Up and Shoring Down

With near-anaphoric repetition
   the tedious Pacific yet insists
on pressing this our gritty beach
   for further evidence. And look!
At intervals the shore concedes. And Look!
   Here and there the cliffs
reveal the land has altogether
   acquiesced, having shrugged
its shoulders, shedding heaps
   of clay onto the grit.

With near-anaphoric repetition
   the melancholic ebb and flow
repeat their endless question, just as we
   interrogate the rock and clay
and fossil-bearing strata for a clue
   regarding what has brought us here,
regarding what might lead us hence.

--Scott Cairns (1954- ), American poet and former professor at the University of Missouri, from Anaphora: New Poems