A favourite poem . . .

Posting this for no other reason than this is one of my favourite poems.

Artwork is mine from 'Mangrove', Penguin 2007, written by Glenda Kane.

The Estuary, by Auckland poet - A.R.D Fairburn, 1904 - 1957.

First published in 1966.

The Estuary

The wind has died, no motion now in the summer's sleepy breath. Silver the sea-grass, the shells and the driftwood, fixed in the moon's vast crystal. Think: long after, when the walls of the small house have collapsed upon us, each alone, far gone the earth's invasion the slow earth bedding and filling the bone, this water will still be crawling up the estuary, fingering its way among the channels, licking the stones; and the floating shells, minute argosies under the giant moon, still shoreward glide among the mangroves on the creeping tide.

The noise of gulls comes through the shining darkness over the dunes and the sea. Now the clouded moon is warm in her nest of light. The world's a shell where distant waves are murmuring of a time beyond this time. Give me the ghost of your hand: unreal, unreal the dunes, the sea, the mangroves, and the moon's white light, unreal, beneath our naked feet, the sand.