I shall never get you put together entirely…

-  The Colossus, Sylvia Plath

“Justice,” says the sea, “is blind, comes rolling

gently today, in and out like a panting dog’s tongue,

lopsided, lazy, languid.” Another draft version

of itself lies on horizon where the sky meeting

is white, blank parchment, this overcast eve

on eastern Irish coast, temperate, mild.

I do not know that it will do, this split-shell,

sand-crunch-underfoot-life but somehow, it does,

inhaling deeply of seaweed, salt-spiked air.

There is a promise of summer breeze, teasing

secrecy on its wings which the gulls realise.

How they screech eagerly with blaring beaks.

In the mountainous distance she awakens,

ginormous as Liberty stepping foot off her island

in Manhattan, out into the Atlantic, alarmingly.

She kicks up sludges of water from her knees,

causing quite a stir. Godzilla floundering.

She is reaching for us all. Arisen from her chair.

But now the sand grows here heavy behind damming rocks,

a wall where water under flows, as if it could be ever stopped,

and there is peace and there is trance in the order of ways,

the lost sword is returned, “tide” its double-edged word.

Swirling in an ebb and flow, a stop motion, shot of time,

dusk will fall, all in all, the Lady weighs the scales.

I am rich because I own seashells newly washed,

thrown up on the strand, gurgled up from the laughing belly

of the goddess. But as it darkens little crab you must scuttle

out to what foamy fingers she reaches to grasp you with.

It will be there on windswept dunes, matted yellow and green

with bush, that danger will come, a cloud across the moon.