Walking back along the ledges
from a fruitless fishing expedition
fruitless but for the pleasure
of sunshine on tons of lazy swelling
clear Atlantic water
shifting glassy at my feet
– I encountered an otter.
Seeing me first it fled
across my path and
slipped into the sea
I searched the swells for it
and when our eyes met – it dived again.
We played this game several times
until I turned the tables
– dropping to my knees I crawled
crouched low over the serpent stone
snake fashion for ten yards until
carefully lifting my head
I saw the otter now searching for me!
We could have played all day
but the knobbly fossils of solitary corral
were hard on my knees
and so we parted with
a final interspecies gamers salute!
© Andrew Wilson, 2024
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Lisa or Li in Poetics, invites us to write a poem about an intimate moment. This encounter with the “other”, a sea-otter, on the West coast of Ireland where I lived for ten years, took place on ledges of “serpent stone” fossil solitary corals, solitary corals that with horizontally across the plane of the rocks…