Sedimental

Time drags heavy in the fingers of the sea,
scattered pebbles on the shore,
too random for a human eye to see.
too many to touch, and not long before

tide tortures bedrock again and violence
in the sea’s receding whisper leaves testament
in the roundness of stone and the silence
left after the scour of storm and sediment;

and still, scars grate across the quartzite,
as if no wound can heal and no wound
ever truly lie at rest nor have the right
to fade forgotten and buried underground.

Sea returns with weather, with ourselves
who step unthinking on the piled strand,
who step on shingle, who change how it shelves
stone by stone, who crush it down to sand.

However old the ground we walk on, the crust,
the grains of it, will grow older yet, older than
our weakened stumbling, wearing gravel to a dust
we could not recognise when our steps began.

The solidarity of stone is disguised by its striation
till fault lines, split by gravity and time, tilt
rock and boulder into waves and inundation,
and leave them grinding into residue and silt.

© BH, 2021

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This was written as a response to a Facebook poem about beach pebbles. It’s a vexed question - to critique or not - or how to in the first place. Especially, if truth be told, the poem in question seems sincere but trite. After all, who am I to judge?

Some favour cruelty for the sake of kindness. But I wonder. Maybe we have two purposes for poetic vision. One is about the release of emotion too long held in check; catharsis. The other is the weaving of it all into words that sing out to others.

How could I dismiss one person's release for the sake of the niceties of expression? I couldn’t zip the lip of anyone who felt they had words to offer up. However they come into the light of day.

So I shared the words the original drew out of me. A companion piece; for better or for worse. Who’s to say what’s better. It's only an echo of an echo.

I was grateful for the impetus to write - I received a thank you in return.

We go on striving. We live and learn.

The above owes a lot to the original and its illustration of pebbles - and more still to Melvaig Beach and the stones I have encountered there.