It is a particular onion-coloured haze
toward the zenith paled, and the water flats
sustain its sheen, the world one tone.
Toward the land bank, down before the dim mill-drums
a spire's streak and some tents of roofs.
The distant sand yachts, tinted, flit
and drains' ends spill themselves to coil into the light.
Among the co*kle-rakers, out there with a bucket,
scratching like an oyster catcher.
Barnacle-encrusted fish traps
palings stretch, black basket-work stockades, for vague
kilometres, their funnels full
of slime, mercurial; and cage
necks squirming with thick, mottled, jetting cuttlefish.
From outlooks such, towards the sea some miles beyond,
unseen in the obscuring mist,
the mussel fences loom in file
while inward trudge the fishermen before the silver
feelers of returning tide,
fore-warned by the appearing gulls,
in this light the insubstance of a vision.
We are the sentinels, who stand out over time:
the forests that once harboured bandits
felled in the millennial plains
still pa**ing in their phantom ranks, like the platoons
of ruffians who marched to wage
that war for wages, and now seem
to march forever on the muddy waste they laid.
The scattered pairs of mussel-pickers and fishermen
with silhouettes of sacks and poles
who home through stockade watches, splash
unclear : survivors, or perhaps surviving ghosts
of that defeat, that trooped back home
from battle with the victory;
and sea crept at their heels among the troops of boles.
Unfocussed, swallowed in the inconclusive years,
the vast trekked fenced and sentried age,
to time's uncertain vantages
they offer their laborious tread and heavy harvest;
throwing up the short defences
to retreat from; digging into
trenches behind ramparts for the tide to cross and drown.
The bogged van carcases they leave behind in pools
sink, and become the rank, bizarre
metropolis of barnacles;
the plastic rotting park-lands of sea lettuces;
the haunt of snails and hunt of rapes
of small delinquent gangs of crabs.
At most, another nation founded upon rot.