Norfolk Pebble

 

Norfolk Pebble.

 

I had not heard of yin and yang,

when the pebble caught my gaze.

I turned it over in my hand,

marvelling at the contrast: black on white,

the darker half pierced with a splash of light,

the paler with a deeper eye, staring back at me.

 

Since then many stones have come to me,

much sea-formed beauty borrowed for a while,

though colours dull with time and sand-wrought polish fades,

enough remains to bring to mind the beaches

where they were flung by winters' storms or springtime tides.

 

Flat grey stones from Pembroke, seamed by white of quartz,

as parcels poorly bound with string.

Glinting schists alive with mica from Iona's holy shore,

close by Columba's footprints where he disembarked, in exile.

Streaked and speckled pebbles from the Moray Firth

rub shoulders with sandstone of the Durham coast.

Garnet and jasper from David's rocky headlands,

square mudstones formed on Sheppey's shore,

and holed flints - magic stones,

said to grant fertility.

 

The Norfolk pebble lacks man-made perfection:

the white is palest buff; the black is darkest brown,

the markings less exact than one would draw.

Yet yin and yang it signifies, fusion of inversions,

complementary halves, joined in one.

not this, not that; both "neither, nor",

and "either, or",

whole, entire, complete.

 

This pebble on my windowsill

once was stranded high beyond the waves,

with empty mussels, cockles, whelk eggs, crabs;

its form displaying unity,

reconciling opposites of black and white

and sea and land.

 

 

 

Published in Mermaids off Cromer Pier and other poems

by Wendy Webb Poetry Feb 2011.

 

 

Done