Coastal Contours

Ancient landscape:
your stoic features
whisper renewed wisdom
with every tidal
turn.
 
Your craggy coastline
Immovable stone
and dancing flower
a living monument
to contradiction.
 
Expansive, far-reaching
and without
perceptible limit;
you simultaneously manage
to serve
as the very symbol
of boundary:
 
An end,
a finish,
a full stop:
a literal
punctuation mark
on a pock-marked
landscape.
 
Perhaps
(perhaps)
It is because
of this
 
strange
 
binary
 
magnetism
 
that we
are so drawn
to the ends of the earth
to feel so small
in your presence.
 
There are many types of landscape
In which to lose oneself
but it is coastal terrain
that delivers
the most evocative
of escapism.
 
You guide me;
yellow gorse flower
on either side
of a stony track
guides my soul
as I approach
your extremities;
my feet feel as if
they have walked this path
in different times,
through different bodies.
 
I stand before you
suddenly very human
 
frail
 
insignificant
 
and feeling
that contradiction
deep inside of me
as saltwater dances on the breeze
with an alchemy
conjured up
by eternity Herself.
 
I am free.