Crossing the Estuary

Port Noarlunga, 1988
That late summer day I waded through sunlight,
tracking the tide-edge for miles,
then swayed under soft green
or arrowed up through waves careering
from all angles, rippled slopes
spiralling me inwards like a shell.
I threw handfuls of bread into the wind
as the seagulls shrieked and gulped
their neediness — a fluttering island
around, above, me; fairness never possible
with the small so timid, the fat and the old
steely survivors, bullying peckers.
Crossing an estuary wider than I had known it,
I was wrapped in a skein of force,
whirled with locked breath downstream
to claw and grapple the rockface,
pressed by an insistent, all-powerful hand
prising my fingers from the watery stone.
Now the day's warmth blooms on my skin,
voices of crickets and dogs fill the night spaces.
A second warmth rises as — stranded in safety,
breathing the slow deep breaths of survival —
I drink wine to past suffering negotiated
(no map to be made of those currents and tides)
and drink also acknowledging what is to come —
some new slippery rockface to be thrust against
as foam splinters round me, shifting honeycombs
of light fade from the riverbed and, high above,
in a still radiant sky, the seagulls are crying
and circling home to the cliffs
where they make their nests.