Footprints in the Sand

When we find footprints in the sand,

Leading from the Sea,

We imagine an envoy perhaps

Or a traveller from a distant country

Come to tell us long term exiles that we can return.

At night we sit by beach fires,

As driftwood adopt animal shapes:

Fishes, lizards, snakes.

We invite nostalgia with our threading flutes,

The galloping guitar,

Hoarse laments of our favourite singer.

And in daytime fields tending red and purple fruits,

We watch the silver river

As it flows into the Sea

And it occurs to us that the mother country,

The one we have abandoned,

Is the Sea itself.

Those footprints then,

Whose were they?

Richard Gwyn