This is where I begin
Our garden is overflowing, but on the road, there is no sign of life
All spread relentless away, grey, black, dust sooth
But no mind as within a minute our four feet are upon the moss of the curved, basin rocks
And there is too much life to take in, here
We climb past the petrified tree, sat like a giant's badly thrown pot
Discarded, but hanging on lopsided
Climbed upon by generations and generations but hardly an obstacle for you at all, now
We creep down the slide of the ashen grey glass
Careful, careful
And as the water rushes to meet our further neighbours
The secret beach is exposed
And this is where we shall go, twice a day
Passing the igneous and the sandstone
The rock pools and the idiot yellow forests
Slowly drying in the sun but sleekit still
You can hold my hand yet run off to the heights, I call out warnings
Terrified of the ending of my world in a few moments time
Should you slip or focus on a maroon red shell-less snail just a little too closely
And here the sand is a renewed virgin here my feet slowly sink
The water creeping to my toes reminding me of my own childhood
The grit under the nail, a blink and I am there, charcoal in my hand
Decorating the rocks with the evil lunged faces
The skull and the cross bone and then a Yelp
And I'm back to you and your calls for attention
I watch the waves the gulls the guillemots and you
I watch you
I breathe the air and momentarily confused a trickle of water with a fat broken heel
I lift and I pop seaweed for a scent achievable nowhere else but my memory
And soon my son you will be me
And I will be gone
And when I die lay my body down, far, far along this furthest strand
We cannot control the longlines
At best I can skim a stone 17 steps with luck
But after that I have no control of the trajectory
The weight, the ripple of the water
So it is important we throw with grace and precision
The collapse of the flight, the illusion
And I teach the curl
Explain my understanding of the cup of the base of the stone
A traditional black weight slate coin, perhaps not the best
For me
And every few moments we will hurl a brick, and laugh
For it always works to hurl a brick, for us
I tire, you skip
I nudge a discarded crab and with a shard I remember a friend
Battered by life's low easy tide
In his own life changing harbour wave
His own tiny tsunami
3 9 3 9
And what a life to live
For that fellow
What a time to realise that this surge will be the last
That he cannot survive this swell
A crash and I panic and I struggle to breathe
Perhaps
He could not find his neuk, in which to shelter
Now, just give me a minute
Like warmth, you return, holding a soap shaped stone
Curved and perfect and
Look, I can use it to draw with
When you carve swift, sharp minds
1, 2, 3
And when it still be here to move in
With short sir