To Paint a Salt Marsh

Samphire and mare’s tail and the salt marsh.

Nothing appears to have movement here

but the birds – it is where the white tern

pivots his swift course and on the tideline

dunlin and sandpiper dibble.

                                              Otherwise,

at low tide, it’s as if the brown sea

clogged in the mudflats. A spar,

tall and near the vertical, splits the view.

And on the horizon a grass-thatched sand-dune

looms like a northern fell. It

lays on the water’s stillness precisely

its own stillness.