The sea remembers her,
though she no longer knows the shape of the path home.
Each morning,
she stands where the tide combs its fingers
through the shingle,
listening for a voice
beneath the hiss and pull of water.
Once upon a time
she carried the ocean easily—
a second skin,
salt-dark and whole,
fitted to her as bark fits a tree.
Now it hangs from a driftwood stake
somewhere beyond remembering.
When she found it again,
washed into a cove of strangers,
it was matted with kelp and
stitched with sand,
as though winter itself
had worried at the seams.
And there was a piece missing.
Not much, perhaps-
Only enough to let the cold in.
Only enough that the skin no longer recognised
the body that sought it.
So she remains on land.
The days pass like weather
over a wounded headland.
Paths once clear
disappear beneath fog.
Distances lengthen.
She watches the gulls lift
without consulting the wind,
and thinks of all the creatures
still fluent in their own becoming.
Around her,
the garden continues.
Seed becomes stem.
Stem becomes flower.
The moon draws its silver thread
through her harbour
as faithfully as ever.
The tide changes.
The tide changes.
Her only constant.
Yet she stands apart from it,
like a lighthouse whose lamp
has lost a pane of glass.
Still she brightly burns.
At times she presses
the torn skin against herself,
hoping muscle and memory
might bridge the absence;
hoping the sea
will overlook what is missing.
But her ocean is honest, not cruel.
It asks her to carry what remains,
learning the altered weight of it,
as though she walks an
unexplored shoreline
without a map
And so she does.
Not gracefully, and
certainly not every day.
But as the reeds bend
under a season of hard wind,
she gathers herself,
echoing the same resilience.
The ragged skin.
The unanswered questions.
The horizon she never intended to follow.
And somewhere beyond sight,
the sea keeps breathing,
but teaching her
the slow, bewildering art
of becoming
someone who can live
with a missing piece,
and still belong
to the tide.
Book of Eucalypt 
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