Beached Bamboo Poem by Tony Jolley

It lay incongruous:
At an angle oblique to its own belonging,
Languishing lonely between retreating tide
And the blind feet of the Good Friday beach brigade
Displaced,
Disinherited,
Denied even a footnote
In the watermargin of either world,
A shadow of its former self,
Reduced in circumstances and stature:
Stunted;
Truncated;
Torso slit and split from navel to neck,
Innards systematically shredded
By the assiduous attrition of salt and sun.

One knot remained resolute,
Its tightly-drawn integrity
Girding and guarding
Its fast-failing fibre ‘wives’,
Husbanding them,
Hopelessly,
Heroically,
To the very last vestige of its tender tension.

Tomorrow there would be another leaving,
Another landfall to test its ring of wedded resolve;
But for today,
Today it had been enough.