Estuary

To Rex Hobcroft

Wind crosshatches shallow water.

Paddocks rest in the sea's arm.

Swamphens race through spiky grass.

A wire fence leans, a crazy stave

with sticks for barlines, wind for song.

Over use, interweaving light

with air and substance, ride the gulls.

Words in our undemanding speech

hover and blend with things observed.

Syllables flow in the tide's pulse.

My earliest memory turns in air:

Eclipse. Cocks crow, as if at sunset;

Grandmother, holding a smoked glass,

says to me,

'Look. Remember this.'

Over the goldbrown sand my children

run in the wind. The sky's immense

with spring's new radiance. Far from here,

lying close to the final darkness,

a great-grandmother lives and suffers,

still praising life: another morning

on earth, cockcrow and changing light.

Over the skeleton of thought

mind builds a skin of human texture.

The eye's [art of another eye

that guides it through the maze of light.

A line becomes a firm horizon.

All's as it was in the beginning.

Obscuring symbols melt away.

'Remember this.'

I will remember

this quiet in which the questioning mind

allows reality to enter

its gateway as a friend, unchallenged,

to rest as a friend may, without speaking;

light falling like a benediction

on moments that renew the world.

This version taken from 'The Penguin Book of Australian Verse' Edited with an introduction by Harry Heseltine.Thanks to Maybe Oneday, one of our readers.