4 June 2023
By Philip Kuepper
In the quiet at twilight
I heard the plashing
of blades cutting the water.
The air hung gray
with the last of night.
Dawn slept.
The scape lay blank.
I could see only erasure.
I knew where curved a spit of land.
I knew what houses stood where.
Yet dusk held them in erasure.
And then out of erasure
I saw slowly emerge a rower,
a bow of shell,
an arm of oar,
a hand on the oar,
then a human form,
and the ever more acute
sound of plashing of blades
cutting the water, cutting
the water into wavelets.
(24 May 2023)