The Wild Atlantic

I think of the sea nosing, whitely sputtering in the crevices

between limestone beds; the chunks of earth’s crust gobbled

by Atlantic’s hunger: headlands shaped by sea’s incursions,

broken headlands, sea stacks with those wild tongues still

rasping up their vertical walls; the insidious creeping through

landward fissures, eventually worm-like slithering to extremities

beneath unwitting green fields; hearing the great gulping yowls

at the backs of caves driven deep into cliffs that should repel like

fortress walls but reverberate with the constant thumping of siege

machines. The frenzy of an ocean contained, but mad to possess;

its ferocity and menace, its harnessing of the universe to drive the

onslaught; its eventual re-shaping of the familiar; this map altered.