Hamelin Bay, bottom end of Wardandi Country.
It’s morning and people are crowded by
the remains of the old jetty.
They stand in the water,
just beyond the small boat ramp,
for a look at or photo of 
the local stingrays.

We begin walking that way 
and I notice in the water
the slow moving
form—like a kind of cloud
shadow—of one of the large rays.
It glides slowly, lazily, rhythmically
along; its outer edges rolling across
the rolling waves of the shoreline.
He’s in the shallows, 
and probably looking for food
in the churned-up sand.

We turn before we reach the crowd,
having seen what we have already seen. 
And then we see him again, all of us
headed the other way now,
and watch him go as we pass.
Coming towards him we see another one,
smaller, its wing tips rising up 
out of the water. Then the larger one is carried 
by a wave 
into the even-more shallows, his wings also coming
up and out of the water.

In this old and crumbled-down place of 
limestone, cracked and deathlike,
rises up this source of movement and life,
attracting people towards it. 
It has a place in the summer and other
journeys of so many,
fitting with some higher logic
and lawfulness into the sourcing
of a larger whole.

Another point at which the past is present
and from which a new future 
can begin.