The Red Sea

Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,

The water swells against the sand,

Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,

In which clear surface, just a little way

From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass

With languid ease, apparently unmanned,

Adrift along the day,

Imagining a breeze to fan

Their motion, though there's none. Siobhan

Reaches a giant hand down from the sky

And nudges with insouciant élan

The nearest hull, her bended waist mast-high.

That hand is just as magically withdrawn.

So moves the catamaran.

And through the Lilliputian fleet

She, Beatrice and Gabrielle

Wade in the shallows, knee-deep, spaceman-slow,

To fashion their maneuvers and compete   

Among the stationed hours to and fro,

While watching through the viscid slide and swell

Of water their white feet,

Made curiously whiter by

That cool light-bending element.

Doubled by shadows on the sand they glimpse

Pipefish and darting fingerlings they try

Impossibly to grab, translucent shrimps

Among the laceweed, seahorses intent

To flee the peopled sky.

Hard to conceive that they should be

Precisely who they are and here,

Lost in the idle luxury of play.

And hard to credit that the selfsame sea

That joins them in their idleness today,

Careless of latitude and hemisphere,

Blind with ubiquity,

Churns elsewhere with a white uproar,

Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees,

Or sucks among the scum and floating drums

Of some forgotten outpost founded for

The advent of an age that never comes,

Or bobs the remnants of atrocities

Limply against the shore.

What luck they have. And what good sense

To leave the water with their toys

When called, before their fortunes are deranged.

And still the day hangs in its late suspense

For hours without them, virtually unchanged,

Until the bay's impregnable turquoise

Relaxes its defense

And sunset's dye begins to spread   

In flood across it to the sand

They stood on, as though, hoping to disown

The blood of all the innocents he'd shed,

Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone

Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand,

Making the green one red.