Mare Nostrum

Changeable beast with rumpled fur of foam

She plunges along the land,

Held by a moonstring, yet by solid rock

Hardly contained.

She is nothing to look at - only clouds and light

Contrive her vanishing jewels,

Her melting zircon and her solid agate.

If you would see her nature, watch

Those palpitating globes within the pool

More transparent yet more firm than mist: .

Her life is a bubble of nothing, cool

Nothing, and like the jellyfish persists.

This yielding overpowers. All in her likeness

Are flutes and whorls in shell and rock and sand,

The Conch full of her music,

The water-colours of Wentletrap and Fan.

And men who chose the shore, aeons ago,

Still spin their memories of her into glass,

Whose splinters worn by water seem to be

Solid green fragments of the sea.

But solid forms renounce her. As for men,

Though other vertebrates return,

Choice of dry land has lost her, let them swim

Each summer through her waves, they never find home.

The lost sea-nature. If her deeps are still,

She has given to men who yearn and may not return to them

Only the restless surface,

The quiet buried away,

The sunset shattered across the rocks in spray.