Tidewater Morning
Tidewater Morning
1Searching the windy strait with narrowed frown,
2She finds between the wrinkled rise and fall
3Of marching seas, a dory, cruising down
4The channel’s reach with tubs of running trawl.
5His time were better spent, she knows, attending
6The careful urging of her common sense:
7Breaking the upper field to seed, and mending
8The kitchen roof, and bracing flattened fence…
9But as he climbs the rutted pasture now,
10Hungry from wind and tide, and oar and barrow––
11Here heart forgets the sowing and the plow,
12Meeting again the strength that never took
13Its grace from gardens, and the long clear look
14That never learned its blue behind a barrow.
RPO poem Editors
Jim Johnstone
RPO Edition
2015
Special Copyright
Poem used with permission of the Charles Bruce Estate.