Poetry, An Affinity with Sheep and other poems

Water world

We have salt water in our blood.

We hear the sound of breaking

waves in our ears. Our dreams

are filled with storms and tides

My nephew has webbed toes –

swims like a fish. My daughter is

half-seal, half-otter, my man a

beached whale in the night

We were all water babies once

Beneath lush

sea green

arable land

lie the ancient floodplains of

an earlier Ice Age

Unseen geology works wonders

as a worm holes and twists

until the slow cast surfaces,

spilling out its raw riches

And still on the mountain tops

a crushed shell, a tiny ammonite is found

to remind us of this deep water world,

Noah’s nautical nowhere.