Gwen Harwood - Estuary

To Rex Hobcroft

Wind crosshatches shallow water
Paddocks rest in the sea's arm
Swamphens race through spiky grass
A wire fence leans, a crazy stave
With sticks for barlines, wind for song
Over use, interweaving light
With air and substance, ride the gulls

Words in our undemanding speech
Hover and blend with things observed
Syllables flow in the tide's pulse
My earliest memory turns in air:
Eclipse. Cocks crow, as if at sunset;
Grandmother, holding a smoked glass
Says to me, 'Look. Remember this.'

Over the goldbrown sand my children
Run in the wind. The sky's immense
With spring's new radiance. Far from here
Lying close to the final darkness
A great-grandmother lives and suffers
Still praising life: another morning
On earth, cockcrow and changing light
Over the skeleton of thought
Mind builds a skin of human texture
The eye's art of another eye
That guides it through the maze of light
A line becomes a firm horizon
All's as it was in the beginning
Obscuring symbols melt away

'Remember this.' I will remember
This quiet in which the questioning mind
Allows reality to enter
Its gateway as a friend, unchallenged
To rest as a friend may, without speaking;
Light falling like a benediction
On moments that renew the world