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 That hand is just as magically withdrawn.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.