The Mousehole Sunrise, 16th December 2022…
I was drawn to the harbour by a pale peach horizon
Marking a sunrise masked by billowing slate clouds,
Like tight grey rolls of harsh barbed wire
Obscuring burning wartime trenches at the Somme,
As the daybreak air iced against my morning face.
Gulls whirled into the dawn with cries raucous and brazen,
Deserting their roosts on St Clement’s Island in crowds.
From the choppy tide, a seal raised its head as if to enquire
What all the fuss was about and maybe from whence I had come:
But then it swiftly submerged and disappeared without trace…
My attention though was drawn to the harbour’s pallid light
With its silhouetted walls and insistent, unhindered tide.
Christmas lights structures of fir trees formed
A row of parched, blackened striplings along a quay wall,
Like sparse, scorched, spiky skeletal trees on battlefields.
Alone, cold and mindful of the scene to which I had been lured,
Although the disc of the rising sun had been obscured,
By the hues and swirls of that Cornish sky I was enamoured.
A low tide was trapped inside the harbour, assured
By seventeen entrance baulks, a system which has endured,
So that floating light installations against storms are secured.
Yet turnstones, gulls, wagtails, pigeons and a redshank still scoured
The rippling shallows, as shoreline morsels were quickly devoured…
And I shivered, joints ached but the awe, the wonder and the allure
Of that Mousehole sunrise, seemed for the troubled mind, a natural cure…
Pete Ray
17th December 2022
Between 7am and 8am on Friday 16th December, Mousehole, Cornwall…
The theatrical light and the ruffle of grey cloud on the horizon which hid the sun itself, offered Mounts Bay a quietly awesome mood and vision.
Despite the cold, I was in thrall of the sky, the harbour, the seal, the birds and the silhouetted effects against a pastel sky…
Loved it all.
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