Repetition

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