At the water’s gentle edge – that can be
storm-driven, flinging sand, seaweed, pebbles,
eroding the dunes, uprooting the seaward
margins of the forest of planted pines
in whose deepest reaches ravens roost –
my granddaughter stands facing the sea,
as she has most summers of her nine years.
In one of the glades of the manmade forest
sibilant with the bay and an off-shore breeze –
along the landward edge of the beach –
someone has hung a length of blue climbing rope
from the one of the tallest trees. Today
she has found it, and arcs above pine cones,
kidney vetch, marram grass, over grains
of sand, subdued, shifting.