Reflections and clouds

Winter sunshine on Traeth Mawr, known as Newport Sands in English although the Welsh name actually translates as Big Beach. The full moon has dragged the tide down to its lowest ebb today. The surf purling in over the wet sand made a very striking image but I wanted to capture this mirage-like effect of cliffs and sky reflected in the glassy surface of the beach.

Recently, Kendallishere introduced me to the work of the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wis?awa Szymborska, who has just died, aged 88 (obituary here.) Everything I have so far read by her has been incisive and humane. As a tribute to her, here is a translation of her poem Clouds.

I'd have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second's enough
for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don't repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they're just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don't care
what they're up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on.

Sometimes I find that an exchange of words in a casual encounter can produce a form of poetry. On the bus home from Newport a middle-aged man, wearing, on a bitterly cold day, a short-sleeved shirt and no jacket, remarked that my dog was limping. (He was right.) Then he leaned over and said "I have one female wife, 5 female daughters, 5 female grand-daughters and 4 and a half female dogs [Half? I didn't go there.] Oh! I said, That's quite a record. Yes, he replied, and I have 5 hairs left on the top of my head. I could think of no response to that.