A poem from 2011. I'd almost forgotten this one, which is ironic when you consider the subject matter.
This was inspired by an actual walk down to the beach at Ravenscar from Boggle Hole, both excellent places to stroll down to and good for hunting fossils
— another rich metaphor about the nature of time, but one I didn't make use of here.
Artistic license alert: on the actual day there were no horses... but there could have been.
Fugit
Above the beach are horses, or so we must believe,
having seen them lounge, tails swinging,
beneath the trees we strolled beneath
—the shade now only another belief
—
when we kicked down through the evaporating dew
in the imaginary morning.
There is of course no time remaining
the moment any moment's done.
Footprints on the sand lie,
another preceding one,
like a man saying "and before that I..."
all the way back to his birth
over by the corner of the beach hut.
The sun westerns.
The tide erodes the beach.
We each stand at the end
of a line of our own feet,
pointing ahead to empty sand, a canvas,
page, or silence waiting dormant;
the prints we are to make implied.
We know we will walk.
We even choose where the next few fall,
but beyond that know nothing at all
of what rock pools we'll peer into,
which breaking waves we'll salt-spray through;
except that the day in time will end
and we will wend back past the horses
—briefly real again
—
with the seashore fading behind us.
Wave and seagull sounds in background are attributed to "justkiddink" and "eelke", and available from: https://www.freesound.org/
