2010 WARM Writing Competition - Open Poem Readers Choice Winner

PACIFIC PROLOGUE - by John McMaster

Stars, morse-coding night’s last messages,

fade before the nascent glow of picaninny daylight.

Long, low, languid clouds

hang, eyebrow-like, above the curved horizon –

tickled pink by day’s first glow

emerging wan from night’s dark womb.

The virgin sun, that aureate morning glory,

sends shafts and shadows, pink and gold, announcing life’s new dawning.

A breeze tip-toes towards the beach across a mill-pond, steaming ocean,

with wispy wraiths of ghostly vapours

dancing to a thermal tarantella.

Messages of warmth spread out to heaven and to earth

that yet another day is spawned –

a day that’s but a grain of sand in the hour-glass of time.

Close inshore, just out of reach,

God’s special children, dolphins, swirl,

torpedoing in flights of fancy, all innocence and play

and, with delphinetic leaps of glee

land in laughing ripples of unselfconscious ecstasy.

Seaweed tangles intertwine over the corrugated, micron grains of ages past,

visible reminders of the power of the tides.

Sea eagles, majestic in their empyrean domain, scan – then swoop – then soar again,

first ritual of their day.

Pelicans, slow-motioning day’s first reconnaissance –

all grace and style and confidence –

contrast the dart and thrust of white-washed gulls, stunt-diving, just for show.

At last, the sun is rising, ascendant, strong and bright

and “Seize it!” is its message, that harbinger of day,

for life is far too precious to dash upon the rocks

of apathy and ignorance of those too blind to see

all Nature’s startling, stunning, special gifts.

The best in life is free

So seize it, share it, savour it,

That gift that’s there before you-

The sun, the sand, the sea!