A tide’s soft waters slip across the pebbly shores;
Our oyster town reveals a myriad of smiles
And twinkling moisture, grey upon the nacreous, white,
Palatially extravagant and gem smooth floors,
While sun delineates the roughly annulated tiles,
And salt winds dry the speechless lanes where all is right.
The wasted earth of yellow, stunted, twitching marsh
Exhausts and blears the primed investigating eye,
But camouflaged with scrub which runs along the sands
A musical migration tends towards the West,
One scouting rat, and two, and then a fluid, harsh
And hustling, dusty, trilling crowd of claws and sly,
Unfettered, simple needs, of nervous quasi-hands
And terrible, incontinent, disdain for rest.
Their whiskered noses draw the appetising smells
Of some ten-thousand unprotected, gaping, tombs,
And climbing briskly on the fatal lower lips
They make to feast upon the meat within the shells,
Which tremble, swift, deliberating rocky domes,
Then bite on silken backs and fiercely wriggling hips.
The easy waves’ returning wash of green and foam
Submerges grief, and all the whiplash tails swing free
Like rippling grasses, tokens of the arid land
Intruding on the ancient freshness of the sea.