Wasn’t walking beside her
walking with the ocean below
when you didn’t know her and wanted to?
In that heat, along that path
you hesitated
at a slug, beached
like a tiny grey whale –
thirty tonnes and seventy years
of navigating the continental shelf
assumed by this soil-scuffing inch
and what would she make of you?
The ocean blinked.
Say you took that step, or say you fell,
wouldn’t she move you miles in herself?