Cold chisels of wind, ice-age-edged,
Hammered hard at the marble block of
This mutilated island. Wind like a wedge
Splitting the cross-grained, bitter sea.
What a pity no artist or master mason
Aims the blows blind Nature lays on!
Flint flakes of a wintry sea
Shaling off the horizon
In endless, anonymous, regimental order.
Fish or fowl should laugh to see
Such penitential hordes of water.
Not so merrily laugh we.
A shag, wave-hopping in emblematic flight
Across that molten iron, seems
Less a bird than the shadow of some bird above,
So invulnerably it skims.
But there’s no sun, and Neptune’s unreflective,
And anyway, who wants a fowl’s directive?…
O sea, with your wolverine running,
Your slavering over the land’s end,
Great waves gulping in granite pot-holes,
Smacking your lips at the rocks you’d devour,
Belching and belly-rumbling in caves,
Sucking your teeth on the shingle! –
How sad to think that, before
You’ve more than nibbled a trillionth of the meal,
A piece of jelly which came from your maw
Many aeons ago, and contracted a soul,
May atomize earth and himself and you –
Yes, blow the whole bloody issue back into the blue.