High Tide at Dusk

HIGH TIDE AT DUSK

From the far-rippling, wide curve of world rim,
Long, level limit of eastern deepblue,
So never-endingly rolls in the swell,
Yellow-gold foam faint-misting slight rainbows,
In the low rays of the late-glowing sun.

Wide are the waves that arrive in half-circles,
Billowing round the blunt headland's out-butting,
Riding the sea as it comes slowly rising
To the white call of the twilight's ghost moon.

Loud are the waves in the spray's golden haze,
Like the world's wisdom of form everflowing,
Flinging their foam on the hard, brown-black cliffs,
Pounding the pebbles and rocks of the shoreline,
Breaking, returning, but never relenting,
Knowing that even the stone slowly changes.

And on high the air runs in invisible streams,
In the whirling and spiralling ways of the wind;
And up there a small, single tern circles so swiftly,
With its arrow wings riding the roll of rough breezes,
As it surfs on the speed of the stinging, ice gusts.

And upon the basalt-boned,
Tempest-beaten, headland slope,
Carpeted by clinging grasses,
Wind-flat, salt-tough, stubborn growth;
Where I'm standing in this
Instant of the wonder;
Squat and scattered,
Everlasting daisies
Lift their small, sight-teasing flowers,
Yellow-rayed and spiral-centred,
As in reverence to far skyfire:

The vastness-forming, soon-to-vanish vortex
Outflowering day's last radiance-
Seamisted, soul-dazzling,
Gold blaze of winter sun,
This moment just touching
Blue western waves of hills.

Those yellow, petal-raying flowers tilt towards
The gold-departing heart of day;
All through the reddened grass they bend
Their round, bright blooms as if to show
In the all-in-all woven world wisdom's wide flow,

As all lives above so all lives below.