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# A mirror on the sand: three poems
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article-1941jsp/
- Published: 2004-06-09T23:06:00.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:49:23.000Z
- Author: Sally Roe
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 19:17

*Norwich, 2002*

**Gulls**

We are too far inland for gulls  
though it seems I hear them  
wheeling in the spaces  
where towers used to stand.

If I walked to the sea now  
what would I find?  
Salt-crystals, pearls, the shells  
to fit my words into

the pairless cockle-words.

Would the scurf clear  
make enough of a mirror on the sand  
for you to see my face  
at the shore’s edge, where the land-lines blur?

I could be beautiful here  
we could make our strange gull-cries together  
I would build no empty towers  
you would keep me from such stairs.

Snow scene with black-headed gulls at the foot of Atago hill district, Hiroshige ga

**The Italian Chapel (built by Prisoners of War on Orkney)**

Plaster, and beneath it  
the corrugated iron you say they built their shelters from  
here, on the island where the sea shifted olive green  
around rocks an eternity away  
from the sunwarmed terracotta of home.

Plaster, painted white against the winter’s bile and fret  
and on the inside painted too  
painted like heaven, you say, your eyes  
looking over my shoulder, hands drawing  
blueprints on the tabletop.

The mouths of the saints, drawn by a homesick man  
whispered of another kind of shelter - in the curve of an arm  
was the angle a girl made, leaning from a doorway  
her face tipped up by a departing hand -  
now they are all dust, that these Orkney winds scour off.

Even the most lapsed men must have become devout, here  
where the maps of their Emperor-fathers grew blurred  
or followed no survey but the veining of the parchment, the twist  
of an inkspill across the page. Out here  
there was a need for another kind of shelter.

It must have captured the imagination of the guards  
or perhaps a newspaperman, over from the mainland  
his city coats blown out into gullwings behind him  
searching for something other than carrion to pick over  
with his neat hands, for the prisoners must have been permitted

their construction, a permission that in turn allowed  
the sentry, bowed by days under the glaring sky  
to meet his own eyes in the mirror, having gazed once  
upon the face of their contraband madonna  
still in the heat from her unset fresco healing.

I see you, ducking under the mantel, past  
the faithful mockery of tower, column, portico  
into the curved gloom, bottletop glass in the windows.  
I want to ask you where you think they got the paint from  
but cannot, cannot shatter this domed and fragile calm

any more than I could ever lay my hands  
beside absences so old they can’t be named, against the plaster flank  
of this glorified shed that was once so full of glory  
gaze into the dulled brown eyes of the saints  
finally cooled into immobility by the wind outside.

I can only lay my hands here, on yours  
on a tabletop varnished in longspilt beer  
only to forget all this for a moment, before  
I will have to say something to bring you back  
from dreams, to another kind of shelter, here.

Orkney Stone, Richard Long

**Night-tide**

I swam the night-tide, thinking I would drown  
my hair a heavy net, a phosphorescent crown  
I sank to where the stars’ dim light was dulled  
to where the currents meshed, and I unfurled  
my hands, and caught between their webs  
the tiny stars that glistened there. I wept  
for the light I had forsaken, and shed my breath  
in silver baubles, strung up from the depth  
I floated, still, suspended for a time  
and as I could not sink, so I began to climb  
wrenched myself back, with bleeding lungs and eyes  
to where the stars still danced, and filled the air with cry  
for I lived yet, and could not bear to drown  
my hair a golden net, a phosphorescent crown.

In the Waves, Paul Gauguin, 1889

Before [*Shorelines*](http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate-1-102.jsp), there was [Hair](http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate-1-78.jsp), and two more evocative poems of Sally Roe: [“Shaving her hair”](https://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=911) and [“Growing my hair”](https://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=970)