Finding Focus Copyright © R J Whiting

Tomorrow, they’d promised
To head for the coast…

Coins dropped in metallic rhyme.
He swept the telescope north to south
To where the bunk-offs lounged, furtively
Lifting dripping salmon from grey waters
By the toothpaste-striped lighthouse
At the harbour’s jaw.

By the lifeboat station
Where rescue dozed, one eye open,
Its slip-way licked by the Tweed
And fringed by swans’ down, drifting,
A seal’s head floats like a lost ball
Towards the North Sea.

Older, turned scientist,
Taking a glass slide
He was a miniature god, to miniature worlds;
The multi-celled mathematics of an oak leaf,
Minute plankton in their Petri-sea,
A sliver of his own young skin;
The nuclei of his name.

Later, taking walks through the hard rocks
Oaths of cold scrawled across his back,
A fire raged in the sleeping house whilst
Rain slammed against the glass and fell
To earth with a scream; Weather-beaten,
He hung himself out to dry.

Then a poet read to him;
Something he’d mined, deep inside;
Honed out of the hardest words
Impervious, but to his calloused heart;
Free from the prying of all eyes,
A monument to his soul.

At once, standing by the door;
He saw the ways clear.
The lens closed. Pennies dropped.
A new-found man stood on the threshold;
And walking out,
Sang to his shadow.

Tomorrow, he promised,
He’d teach him to smile.