A Peculiar Cleft

The sea slides out

on morning’s ebb tide.

The singular cleft is exposed,

smiling an inviting, vertical smile,

fertile with slimy life.

Spirals and ovals

of primaeval petrified shells

make mystifying marks

around the portal.

(To welcome or repel?)

Coalesced

with live twinkling cousins

on the cracked Carboniferous rock:

limpet, whelk

and periwinkle.

I penetrate

the folded, faulted fissure,

assaulted by the miasma

of salt and secretions.

Slipping

on storm-loosed kelp

and lifeless purple laver.

Savouring corrupt, exotic flavours.

In the dank chamber

wild one-eyed jelly-beasts

are meshed with rare shells

of every denomination.

A deviant niche indeed.

Shrimp shoals glide,

shackled in infested black pools.

Anaemic shore crabs scutter

amidst rank bladder wrack,

immune to the venom

of their now powerless enemy:

the unstirred anemone,

stranded,

tentacles flaccid and lank.

Nature’s paradigm:

stressed flesh resting

in this eerie, hostile slit.

Evolution’s masochistic gambit.

Surviving between water and air.

Bit by bit, biding time.

Queerly alive.

Waiting to be revived

when the ascendent moon

draws the sea-cover over.