For Sylvia Selzer
So many ways to paradise or nowhere!
Not thirty five feet from our holiday let,
sitting on a county council bench
overlooking the sea – where the container ships,
waiting to cross the sand-bar, turn with the tides –
sitting in the hearing of terns and curlews
are a different pair each day
of female Jehovah’s Witnesses.
You baptise and christen them ‘The Joysters’.
They set up a collapsible stand –
next to a black municipal refuse bin –
for flimsy leaflets, and advertising
an online bible course. Their witness time
is spent under a black umbrella, chatting
to each other, ignoring passing sinners
on their way to walk the Coastal Path
to St Patrick’s Church at Llanbadrig,
or paddle-board and kayak on the briny.
There seem as many ways to row to heaven
or hell as there are birds of the air and the sea –
each journey with its own arcane charts,
its especially beatified isles,
its superior monsters of the deep.