Strandings

Strandings

 

All that in its gilled or spiracled lunglessness

gasps for water and chokes on sand

or drowns in clagging air - all that blues

the sand with dying stings, or flakes

its shell on the abrasiveness of sand -

all that sand claims by the bleaching

sovereignties of wind and brine, or that submits

its softer underside to the needling silicons

of sand - all that flails against sand,

all that, in dying, dries out, refines,

itself becomes sand - is kin to me. I am one

in several thousand strandings with a waning

iridescence, strangled, scorched and sighing

blear-eyed through these crusts of drying sand.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. The picture shows a Portugese Man o' War on Goode Beach, Albany, Western Australia.

Done