Saltings - a poem by Steve Griffiths

To celebrate the beginning of 2018, the Year of the Sea in Wales, we asked Steve Griffiths, our favourite local poet, if we could share his beautiful piece entitled 'Saltings.' --- The taste that sea-salt opens up: its slow, white bolt from the blue. The taste you thought just out of reach, the memory you find you never knew you’d lost. Sardines newly caught on the beach. - Add seasalt to risotto. It pulls you in towards a chorus of ingredients, the memory of sea beneath them as they make their entrance and they sing, the sea-bass thrumming in the undertow taut as a bass-string. - Sea-salt summoned where the hawthorns lean right over under the determined salt wind: when you were little it would hold you up if you leaned back on it. The pleasure of the gust sustained: blow, wind, hold my body upright, trusting, behind me the west, my lips awakened to its taste. - Once you ran to keep up with a moving column of sunbeams, listening for the washing’s crack on the line, the whip of sails. Sheets hung out on billows of Atlantic wind. At night they will enfold your child’s dreams of salt, of scales glistening. - Something brought in from far out where the sea churns, runs, dances into space, pulled by the moon that brooks no refusal. Crystals of seasalt glisten up from a dish, light without eyes snagged on a sightline. Just the salt and the moon: unconsummated recognition. They’re miraculous, those eyes that lock across a meal amid the blind whisperings of light. Steve Griffiths' latest collection of poems, Late Love Poems, is out now. Image: our friends Liz and Max H Hamliton