South Winds

When I met the ‘you’ of this poem in 2011 and began to write poetry again, she told me of an encounter years before when, during a period of sadness in her life, she had travelled to the north coast of Cornwall and, from a cliff top, saw a grey seal with whom she performed the dance that, years later, she repeated during a trip to North Pembrokeshire in the autumn of 2023. We were staying at the time in a cottage called ‘South Winds’. The grey seal has since been her totem animal, enchanting her with its rare appearances on our journeys around the British Isles, captivating us both with its strange familiarity, and on this occasion, it seemed, when we had recently made our decision to leave the United Kingdom for Hong Kong, drawing us towards the future.

•   •   •   •   •

From five degrees above a frozen sea
And two-hundred-and-sixty fathoms deep,
Submerged for three-quarters of an hour
(But what figures can’t her body devour?)
Wrapped in a two-inch coat of blubber,
Lungs emptied against the crushing pressure,
Breathing the oxygen stored in her veins,
Heart slowed down to a solitary beat
For every ten seconds of life in the deep,
A grey seal surfaces into our lives.

Turned and turning in the maelstrom bay
Below us, come to calve in these autumn days,
Whisker-alert to our passing presence
And your impromptu dance of remembrance
Of that unfathomable melancholy;
And — turns out it was true, your story! —
Mimicking your cliff-top pirouettes,
Her black-bottle eyes fixed like a mother
Searching this barren land for her daughter
(Where I framed both with my final regrets).

But this I swear: that I saw from above
Between you pass the rudiments of love
Born of your evolutionary rapture
To communicate, one with another,
Using every gesture of man and beast
(Turn like a seal, dance on flippered feet)
A semaphore of kisses blown on the wind
From salty lips to heathered cheek — crying:
‘Why with laws of men are you complying
When it’s freedom’s ocean you long to swim?’

No photograph could capture her beauty,
No words convey the yearning in her gaze
Or memory recall the tide’s last wave
As she turned and swam back into the sea;
Vanished through the squares of an Escher print
Turned gulls by the ebb and flow of ink
(Aquamarine blue, sea green, now sky grey)
From Ramsay Sound into St. Brides Bay:
Beating to windward for a thousand miles,
Flying South, as we are, and in her wake

Abandoning these floundering Isles.

Simon Elmer, from his book, Fight and Flight: Poems, 2012-2023, which is available in paperback. Please click on the link for the contents page, preface and purchase options.