Hills green with Spring and promise of high Summer.
Birdsong, and skylarks rising from the gorse, hills,
Still clothed with verdure while urban tide,
Remorselessly creeping, eating at the base of the hills.
Hungry, greedy for more.

Sea and tide creeping into gullies.
Washing silently over mudflats where waders and gulls,
Were feeding, but now the eels and flatfish.
Coming back to browse, all part of a grand symphony of nature.
Playing over mudflats dark and oozy.

I push the dinghy out across the hillocks of black mud.
And the tide washes back along the channel,
Filling the deeply sunken footprints,
Where I trod, and where the keel cut straight path,
Through the mud and weeds.

Clinging mud where boat slips gently to the water.
And I bend to the oars to free her from the land’s last grip.
Where my thoughts float free and I watch the cormorants,
Drying their wings on channel markers and the posts,
Pile driven into mud.

Gulls cry forlornly, as, riding the wind, they mock.
A man pulling on two crude wooden sticks.
Against the tide, to force a rough-hewn dinghy,
Water slapping on the prow.
Fibre glass and wood.