THE DOLPHINS

(at Spooky’s, Angourie, Northern NSW)

From the point, sky-clock ticking,

Earth slowly spinning,

Hard to believe it only took a week to make,

But God cleaned up with his spade and rake,

The Sun is setting, the crowd is thinning,

And wave after wave on rock after rock,

The waves like drills through rocks are winning.  

The farther I stare, the more I care

To let my eyes flow,

Investigate the drift below,

I see in those waves like dryland snorkeling in a fluid haze

A seashow resisting my squinting gaze,

And as the unsettled night drifts this way,

I want to stay, I want to play

Like childrens’ faces in parks grinning.

Sundragon’s fire going shyly out,

The wind though, sometimes even seems to shout,

But other times whispers gently, about

Time’s real beginning,

The seawhite hands of waves roll from the left,

Sprayed fists and mists blow from the right,

The Sun’s still rests into mattresslumpy night,

The symmetry is broken by the wind and water chest-beating in frenzied fight.

But beyond the white lines, on a calm day a semaphore of elation,

The cipher says stay away today from this troubled corner of creation,

Not meant for gills that died before birth in evolution’s sophistication,

I’m sitting on a wavedrilled rock avoiding this swirling confrontation,

Just able to be seen and surfing,

Like those memoried children’s parkfaces grinning,  

A symphony of dolphins in ragged formation,

But yet no gills have they for breathing,

As all the while the light is dimming.

No land they walk, nor ocean I swim, but in this serendipitous meeting

Of troubled night from seaboiled rocky seating,

There is frustrated dreaming,

I will become a dolphin on land

To breathe life’s air, simple purpose in hand

Crossing earth’s waves not previously spanned

And I see at this place, as though through binocular’d eyes,

That as a dolphin I may be a peacefilled man.

Here, white water, with mist off the back,

Evening surfers defy the cipher, dolphins play, an orderly stampede at sea,

The game is on in patternless melee,

And a part of this I want to be me.

As water erupts in an unending demand

of hollow shapes that challenge the sand,

A surfing competition, between mammals of still evolving strands,

If only to see who’s first to the beach or who lasts the longer,

The surfer above or dolphin beneath, and which of the two should I wistfully ponder?

Both breathing air but which belongs, and where, and which the stronger?

No matter now, I know where I am,

To be a dolphin on earth-bound land,

To seek to adapt across the sand,

Sun’s falling yellow disk surveys and sighs,

For on this point of rock, as Sun dragon’s fire slowly dies,

I know as surfers strive to shore, awaiting tomorrow’s ultra-violet lotion,

That these streamlined dolphins belong in the ocean.