Ballintoy Harbour
Ballintoy Harbour, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
During a college-organized tour of Northern Ireland in February 2014, we visited Ballintoy. When we walked down to the Harbour, the beauty of the landscape and the sea struck me. “Ballintoy Harbour” wrote itself in my head as I climbed around the rocks.
Poem and photograph previously published on Champlain College Dublin (see CV); poem revised from same.
Leave me here, buffeted,
cheeks wind-rouged,
hair tossed like the waves
crashing against this outcrop.
I would picnic here,
with sheep-dotted hills
and orderly fieldstone walls
behind me, the sun rising,
washing Rathlin Island’s pale cliffs in dawn-light.
I would sit on this rippled grass,
watching Scotland shimmer through sea-fog,
cloudy foam catching and bubbling
between millennia-old basalt rocks,
broken waves rivuleting
down the pocked, craggy surface;
seaweed shifting under the tide;
sand ebbing back and forth,
dragged and pushed, dragged and pushed
by green-blue waters.
I would sit,
eyes closed,
the perfume of salt heavy,
listening to the roar and crash,
roar and crash,
roar and crash of the sea.