My Beak was close fettered,
the currents of ocean,
running cold beneath me.
There I grew in the sea, my body close to the moving wood.
I was all alive
when i came back from the water
clad all in black,
but a part of me white.
When living
the air lifted me up,
the wind from the wave bore me afar -
up over the seals bath.
Tell me my name.
It is known that in Scotland there was once a tree growing on the bank of a river which produced fruits shaped like ducks.
When these were nearly ripe, they dropped down of their own accord,
some onto the earth, and some into the water.
Those that landed on the earth rotted away,
but those that sank into the water
instantly came to life, swam up from below the marshy roots,
and immediately flew into the air, equipped with feathers and wings.
On one occasion I have seen them with my own eyes on the coast of Cove Sea, when a piece of wrangled drift wood washed upon the shore, dancing between the seaweed and my unsuspecting ankles.
There they were, more than a thousand of these tiny little bodies, hanging from a piece of wood on the sea-shore, their gum like forms enclosed in their shells. The shiny nacre a pearly placenta protruding from the burly fir-wood.
I pried open a few of the clam-like shells and peered inside. They were clinging by their beaks, like tiny anchors embedded in the grain. Holding them up to sunlight, their pink translucent bodies glowed, i could see through thin moist feathers all the way to their bleating heart.
Their wings dressed in wispy black feathers were sodden, tucked in against their fragile frame and looked much too premature for flight.
As they pulsed and wriggled like a disgruntled baby sleeping, feeling like a guilty mother I closed the shells back up, swaddled the driftwood in a clump of seaweed and set the strange ark adrift in the water again.
I waded in the cooling tide until the sleeping nursery was just a speck floating on the horizon before I turned to the journey home.
I may never know which of those strange beings sank further into the rotting waters or flew off into the freedom of air. When I revisited the town nearly a decade later I eagerly investigated the matter - asking the townsfolk if anyone knew the fate of the barnacle geese,
and it was then that I learned that miracles always recede further and further into the distance.