Kyoto and welcome to Swim Chats, a podcast about swimming.
I'm Shona Radel, a writer and swimmer from Wellington, Altero
in New Zealand. For each episode, I talk to a
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To help me keep running the podcast, there's a link in the
episode description. So welcome to the special
episode about sea and swimming poetry.
Today, I'm joined by my good friend and returning guest,
Sinead. Sinead, welcome back to the
podcast. Delighted to have another
opportunity to talk all things swimming and writing and poetry.
Shona, it's great. To see you so Sinead and I last
recorded an episode together about movies, music, and books
about swimming so for those who haven't heard that episode, I'll
link to it in the show notes And we had so much fun doing that
episode that we decided to do another one.
And this one's about poems because we both enjoy poems
about swimming and the sea. And So what we're going to do is
take turns reading some of our favorite swim poems, more or
less organized by theme or location or sort of general
vibe. But what I'll do is I'll put a
full list of the poems we read in the episode show notes so
people can have a look at the full list and see what we're
covering that. Before we get started, just a
couple of quick sort of housekeeping notes. 1 is that we
won't be talking about Lord Byron's famous swim poem in this
episode because he's already been covered in one of my
history episodes with John Hancock that I recorded last
year. The episode's called Swimming
with Lord Byron, so for those who haven't heard that episode,
I'll just recap Byron's story quickly.
Lord Byron was the romantic poet who swam across the Hellspont or
now called the Dardanelle Strait in 18-12.
And so according to my sources that swim was about four
kilometers but current assisted, which would make it feel more
like possibly 3 kilometers or 3.5.
But after that swim, he wrote a poem called Written After
Swimming From Sestos to Abedos. And his poem is about the Greek
mythological figure Leander, who swam across the same body of
water each night to visit his lover hero, who lived in a
tower. And she would light a Lantern to
show him the way. And they would have their
special nightly visits. No spoilers, but there's a bit
of a sort of Romeo and Juliet element to the story, which is
quite a major spoiler, really. But yeah, basically it all goes
well until it doesn't. Second note is that we also
won't be talking about the Wellington poet Kate Kemp or her
swimming poems on this episode because she has her own episode
where she came on the podcast and read one of her beautiful
poems. So again, I'll link to that in
the show notes. And just sort of more generally
about this poetry episode we're about to do.
Even if you're, even if you don't consider yourself a poetry
person, that you probably do because you're already
listening. But even if you're not sure what
to expect, I'll just say that Sinead and I aren't about to do
deep dives, no pun intended, or sort of analytical deck
instructions of all these poems. It's purely about just the
enjoyment of reading the poems so you can listen to them and
get a sort of sensory feel for the, the pleasures of swimming,
the salty air, you know, the morning sun, all all that sort
of stuff. Yeah.
So it's going to be a lot of fun.
And my final note before I finally let Sinead get talking
is that when I was collecting poems for this episode, I asked
around my reading and writing friends for suggestions and a
number of people came forward with some great ones.
So I'd like to acknowledge Catherine, Sophia, Kate, Fiona,
Feeney, Frank and Rachel for helping contribute to this
episode. So, Sinead, while I take a
breath, is there anything you'd like to add?
No, just keen to get started. That was a great introduction,
Shona. And yeah, it it, it was
definitely worth mentioning the Byron poem because it probably
is the most famous swimming poem of all time.
But that's not to say we haven't got some brilliant ones to read
to you today. Exactly.
Cool. All right, Well, shall we start
with our readings? Yeah, well, I thought before
we'd get into specific swimming poems that it might be good to
acknowledge the some great poetry which is more generally
about the sea. And I thought you might start
yourself actually, Shona, with a beautiful poem by DH Lawrence.
And then I follow up with some other great poets by the Sea of
the Sea. Perfect.
All right. Thank you, Sinead.
I must admit to some slight performance anxiety as I start
doing these readings, but I'm sure I'm sure they will go very
well. So, yeah, this one's called
Manna of the Sea by DH Lawrence. Do you see the sea breaking
itself to bits against the islands, yet remaining unbroken?
The level grape sea have I caught from it the tide in my
arms that runs down to the shallows of my wrists and breaks
abroad in my hands like the waves among the rocks of
substance? Do the rollers of the sea roll
down my thighs and over the submerged eyelets of my knees
with power? Sea power?
Sea power to break against the ground in the flat, recurrent
Breakers of my 2 feet? And is my body ocean?
Ocean whose power runs to the shores along my arms and breaks
in the foamy hands, whose power rolls out to the white trending
waves of 2 salt feet? I am the sea.
Gorgeous.
Well, you know, as well as umm, DH Lawrence of the classic, umm,
classic English poets, Keats is very famous.
John Keats is very famous for his ode to the sea.
And I'm not going to read the whole thing.
A sonnet to the sea. Sorry, it's called.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but just a few lines.
And it's funny, whenever I read this poem, I always think of my
English teacher at school and I can hear her voice reading it
because she loved this poem and she made us learn it by heart.
And so if I if I break into a kind of a weird Irish country
accent reading it, it's because I'm remembering her reading it
to us. So these are the few lines from
John Keats, Sonnet to the sea. Oh, ye who have your eyeballs
vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the sea.
O ye whose ears are dimmed with uproar, rude, or fed too much
with cloying melody, Sit you near some old cavern's mouth,
and brood until ye start as if the sea nymphs squired.
Beautiful. Thank you Sinead.
I love how you mentioned your your English teacher like we
always remember our great teachers.
Oh yes, that reminded me that in the 1990s when I was a teenager
I watched Dead Poet Society. Do you remember?
That I do remember that. I was so inspired by it.
It just really gave me this love of English and I ended up doing
Korean English literature at university.
Well, you did the right thing. I wish I'd done the same, but.
Anyway, well, it was about it was it feels like 1000 years ago
now, but if I have any credentials for this episode,
it's the fact that I did to create an English and 1996.
Yeah, if I have any credentials, it's the love of poetry
installed in me by Mrs. Skien. So she's no longer with us.
But you know, I did write to her later in my life and, and just
acknowledge and just thanked her for giving me this love of
poetry because it's such a joy in my life and the double joy of
poetry and swimming. Today's just got me buzzing.
That's so cool. I love how you wrote to her.
That's such a a good idea to write and thank the people who
inspire us. Oh, we, we should always do
that. Yeah.
Well, the other, my other favorite poet of the sea is
Paulo Neruda and the Chilean poet.
And, you know, he wrote beautiful odes to the sea even
though, in fact, he couldn't swim.
But he was surrounded, of course, being in Chile.
Well, well, there's such a long, beautiful coastline there.
So he was obviously inspired by that.
And later in his life, he lived in the Mediterranean looking
overlooking the sea. So, umm, he, he, he was in love
with the sea, as you'll see from his poems.
So, so I'm going to read a few lines from one which is simply
entitled The Sea and it goes, I need the sea because it teaches
me. I don't know if I learn music or
awareness, if it's a single wave or its vast existence, or only
its harsh voice or its shining suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep in some magnetic way, I
move in the university of the waves.
The sea is really our university, isn't it?
For us swimmers, you know. Umm, yeah, we've all been to
university in some way or another.
But honestly, to get in the sea and it, it can teach you
everything. As his poem says, he has another
one called Ode to the Sea. And I'll it's a bit different
and I'll read a few lines of that here on the island.
The sea, and so much sea, overflowing, relentless.
It says yes, then no, then yes. In blue, in foam with gallops.
It says no. And again, no, it cannot stay
still. My name is C.
It repeats while slamming against rocks.
Father C, we know already what you are called.
All the seagulls circulate your name on the beaches.
Now behave yourself. Don't shake your mane, don't
threaten anyone, don't smash against the sky your beautiful
teeth. Ignore for a moment your
glorious history. Give to every man, to every
woman, and to every child a fish, large or small, every day.
Thank you, Sanae. All right, now we're moving
closer to home and we have a couple of New Zealand swimming
poems and also one Maori Pepe ha, which is it's like a
proverb. So this one that I'm about to
read is from iwi and Fanga Nui. And so I'll read the TDL, and
then I'll read the English translation Eriko Mai taawa nui
Mai ET kahui monga kitamaroa quo de our quo de our quo.
The river flows from the mountains to the sea.
I am the river. The river is me.
That's. Yeah, I feel like, doesn't it?
It's yeah. Like we're part of the the
water. Yeah, we are.
We are the water. You know the way in your Pepia
you say my, my river is, You know, I am that river, I am that
sea. It's so beautiful.
I believe you also have a lovely poem by Roma Porticki.
Yeah, so this is a New Zealand poet, and the name of the poem
is And my heart goes swimming. And my heart goes swimming wet
and limpid. It hangs between waves of salt.
A warm heart in cold green waters, deep to the bottom.
Wave after wave washing a little skin saline and my heart goes
swimming. A fisherman scoops the sea,
finds a heart in his hand. No cold fish.
Warm red blood, black hair, blonde.
A night of swimming, open eyes laugh, see us, love the man and
my heart celebrate. And in the morning, warm water
from the tap. But now the fisherman has fish
to catch. See, he has a net and sinkers
back to the sea. My heart goes swimming wave
after wave. No fish could swim like my heart
goes swimming. Gorgeous.
And I'm going to follow that up with some lines from a wonderful
Pakia, New Zealand poet called Rachel McAlpine, of whom I'm
sure many of your listeners have heard.
And she calls this an instant poem.
Like she says she just sort of wrote it on the way to, to the
beach. So it's, it's fairly it's it's
not, you know, very kind of polished, but I think it's it's
gorgeous. So it's quite long.
Also, I'm just going to read you some of it.
Sea swimming in spring. An instant poem.
When I leave home for the gym, I'm often thinking, no, this is
no day for a swim. But then I see the sea ahead and
all my wimpiness has fled. It's dead.
A blue sea with sunshine sparkling.
A grey sea soaking up cloud reflection.
A Black Sea gritty with icy flecks.
A brown sea growling with Breakers.
A green sea with puzzling projections.
I love the passing conversations with the dabblers and the
paddlers. I love the mighty distance
swimmers, all of them shining with that triumphant swimmers
joy. I love the seabirds puttering
and fishing. I love the children on the
beach. I love the heavenly extension
when I shut my eyes and whisper I am the sea and the sea is me.
I love that poem so much. I love how she acknowledges the
different types of swimmers as well, the dabblers and the
peddlers and the mighty distant swimmers.
Yeah, Yeah. That's great.
Yeah. So our next collection is of the
theme Swimming Can Heal and Save You.
So these quite positive ones. The next one I'm going to read
is by Maxine Kuhman, who was is poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize
winner for poetry. It's called Morning Swim.
Into my empty head there come a cotton beach, a dock where from
I set out, oily and nude through mist and chilly solitude.
There was no line, no roof or floor to tell the water from the
air. Night fog, thick as Terry cloth,
closed me in its fuzzy growth. I hung my bathrobe onto pegs.
I took the lake between my legs invaded and invader eye went
overhand on that flat sky. Fish twitched beneath me, quick
and tame in their Green Zone. They sang my name and in the
rhythm of the swim I hummed A2 four time slow hymn.
I hummed Abide with me. The beat rose in the fine thrash
of my feet, rose in the bubbles I put out slant wise, trailing
through my mouth. My bones drank water.
Water fell through all my doors. I was the well that fed the
lake, that met my sea, in which I sang Abide with me.
Oh, that's so gorgeous. And I hadn't heard of Maxine
Kuhman, so I'm definitely going to have to check out more poems
by that poet. It's such a pleasure to read
that one because it's it's just got this beautiful rhythm and
yeah, perfect rhyme. Well, the next few lines I'm
going to read are just from a blog that I found online,
written by Dawn Swimmers and wild swimmers from around the
world. It looks like they all
contributed a few lines to a very long poem called Water Is
My Prayer. And again, I'm just going to
read a few lines of it. May joy be my favorite stroke as
I glide through river, ocean, stream, or lagoon.
May I be wise, bountiful and ruthless like great ocean to do
what must be done. May I simply be water, adaptive,
flowing, soft yet determined, unapologetic for being what it
is as water is itself. I breathe with the earth and
water is my prayer. It's beautiful.
We have a very special treat now, listeners.
It's a poem written by our very own Shona Riddle.
And I think you're going to all relate to this, all you
Wellington swimmers. So take it away, Shona.
Oh, now I have major performance anxiety.
So I was when I was collecting all these poems together, I felt
inspired to write my own. And I've been enjoying the
scenic saunas that we have in different parts of Wellington.
One's been in Scorching Bay at the moment down the road from
me. And so the idea is you book,
book out a spot in the sauna, and if you want, you can go in
and out of the sauna and into the sea, which is it's just so
much fun. So my poem is called From Sauna
to Sea on a rainy autumn day. After 10 hot minutes, it's time
to break free of the sizzling coals, soggy towels and pink
faces. I fling open the wooden door and
the cold rain meets my face like a celebration.
My feet patter over the thick beach grass, the firm sand.
I'm running to meet the sea. The world widens as my toes
touch the shoreline. The pale sea blends with the
heavy sky like a watercolor, and it's so calm on the surface that
I can see thousands of raindrops punching holes as I slide in.
That's gorgeous shown. It makes me want to go and book
a saunas straight away. They should use it in the
marketing. Yeah, exactly.
You should sell it to them and put it.
They can put it up on, they can put it put it up in in the sauna
for people to read and inspire a peak custom.
I've suggested Michael. Do do.
Well, I'm a complete Japanophile and I love haiku and you know,
we have our little wahini white swimming meet on Saturday
mornings. But we also made every full
moon. And I wanted to acknowledge Kim
here because Kim organizes us and tells us when it is full
moon and what time the full moon is going to rise and encourage
us, us all, especially in winter, to overcome our
resistance and get get down to the sea and be in it when the
moon rises. And it's such, so worth it when
you make yourself do it. It can, in this time of the
year, mean going out after dark and all that, but it's
completely worth it to be in the sea with the moon shining down
on us. I've got such magical memories.
In fact, we've got 1 coming up this Sunday because it's going
to be blue moon. And so second opportunity in the
month of May, you know, when there's two full moons in a
calendar month. So Kim, let us know where to be
and we'll be there. Thank you, Kim.
And it reminds me, I subscribe to Outdoor Swimmer magazine,
which is the UK magazine about about wild swimming and that
they have a theme each month and this month theme is night
swimming, which is such a yeah. So I'll lend you that issue
tonight. I think you'll really love to.
Read it. Yeah.
Well, just as a nod to Kim's
getting us organized for these wonderful full moon swims, I'm
going to read a little haiku by the most famous haiku master of
all time, Matsuo Basho. And it goes the full moon.
Seven story songs of a woman turning towards the sea.
Awesome, thank you Sinead. I love haiku as well.
They're small, but powerful. Yeah, you've got a small big.
Powerful one next, yeah. Yes, that's right.
Yeah. So that leads nicely into my
poem, which is EE Cummings. A lot of listeners would have
heard of them. And there's a sort of playful
poem called Maggie and Millie and Molly and May.
It goes. Maggie and Millie and Molly and
May went down to the beach to play one day, and Maggie
discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn't remember
her troubles. And Millie befriended a stranded
star whose raised 5 languid fingers were.
And Molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced
sideways while blowing bubbles, and May came home with a smooth,
round stone. As small as a world and as large
as a lone. Whatever we lose, like a you or
a me, that's always ourselves we find in the sea.
Oh, that's beautiful. That's one that I think, you
know, if you're introducing children to poetry, would be a
lovely way in because it's so playful and gorgeous.
Drake's theme is drowning in mermaids.
So yeah, the tone is getting a little bit darker here.
And it's referring to drowning, obviously as a literal cause of
death, but also sort of metaphorical drowning, right?
We use drowning to refer to struggling.
Yeah. So my next poem is one that
actually several people recommended, and it's called Not
Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith.
Nobody heard him, the dead man, but still he lay moaning.
I was much further out than you thought.
And not waving, but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved
larking, and now he's dead. It must have been too cold for
him. His heart gave way.
They said, Oh no, no, no, it was too cold always.
Still the dead man lay moaning. I was much too far out all my
life and not waving but drowning.
Yeah, that one is chilling. But such a great poem.
Yeah. Very.
Powerful. Yeah.
Well, I'm going to read 1 by William Butler Yates, my fellow
countryman. And and it's it's called Man,
Young and old, The Mermaid. And I should say before reading
it that, you know, we love mermaids and we, we think of
ourselves as mermaids a lot of the time.
But when you read the mermaid poetry, especially that written
by men, it's often quite dark and, umm, you know, uh, dare I
say misogynistic and sort of blames the mermaid for luring
sailors to their debts and all that.
And this is this is a little bit along those lines, man, young
and old. The mermaid The mermaid found a
swimming lad, picked him for her own, pressed her body to his
body, laughed and plunging down, forgot in cruel happiness that
even lovers drown. That's another dark.
One, isn't it the idea that the mermaid using the the boy is
sort of a her play thing? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, a lot of are. Like that?
Yeah. A lot of mermaid poems are like
that, and I think mermaids will deserve their own episode of
Swimming Chats at some point. I think so and we may.
I think we should definitely do a mermaid episode and and you
know, present more positive view of our Mer.
Because these days we have professional mermaids like
people who mermaid does a career we.
Do so we might get them to talk to us.
That would be so cool. So the next theme is a very
specific sort of sub genre of swimming poems, which is
political swimming poems. And I don't know how many of
these there are, but we've got one by Chairman Mao and it's
called swimming. So just a little bit of context
for this one. Chairman Mao swam across the
Yangtze River more than once. Actually, he swam across it in
the 1950s and in the 1960s. So this was when he was sort of
aged in his 60s and 70s. And the purpose of the swims
were to demonstrate courage and strength.
So the one in 1956 was right before the Great Leap Forward,
and the one in the 1960s was right before the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. So the the distance of the swim
was about 15 kilometres. But apparently the current
assist of the river was never acknowledged.
So state media perhaps exaggerated his speed as well
when they said he swam 15 kilometres an hour, which would
have been a world record and surpassed any Olympian speed
could be. Taken with a grain of salt.
I think I mean taken with a good good cup of salt.
Yep. So anyway, this is just part of
his poem Swimming, which he wrote in 1956.
I have drunk the waters of Chang SAR and come to eat the fish of
Wu Chang. Now I am swimming across the
Great Yangtze, looking afar to the open sky of Chu.
Let the wind blow and waves beat.
Better far than idly strolling in a courtyard, and I think
that's a bit rough on people who like to stroll around
courtyards. Yes, I was also reading
somewhere shown that Chairman Mao liked to hold meetings in
their swimming pool and, and there was 2 reasons for that.
One was to show off his swimming prowess because he was very uh,
proud of his physical umm, capabilities and umm, another
was to kind of demoralize whoever he was having the
meeting with because not everybody likes getting naked or
semi naked and jumping in a pool to have major meetings.
And once, you know, from the Soviet, uh, Union, Khrushchev,
umm, went to visit him and they were to have a very serious, you
know, umm, meeting between Russia and China.
And he made him undress and put on his tugs and hop into a pool.
And so Khrushchev was immediately at a disadvantage
having to, umm, to, to, to have the meeting under those
circumstances. And it gave him out the upper
hands. So he, he yeah, we don't have
any homes about swimming pools in this episode.
But yeah, that was a that was a way that he he used the swimming
pool. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't
it? Yeah, certainly one way to
conduct meetings. Well, you or I might mind if,
but, you know, the leader of the Soviet Republic arriving in
Beijing, having to, Yeah. Put on battles and get in the
pole. Yeah, well.
We thought we'd read a couple of poems now about swimming and the
sea, really, by some famous women poets to begin with the
first one, Sylvia Platt. So I'll read that one, Shawna.
It's called aquatic nocturne. Deep in liquid indigo, turquoise
slivers of dilute light quiver in thin streaks of bright
tinfoil. On mobile.
Jet pale flounder waiver by tilting silver in the shallows.
Agile minnows flicker gilt. Grape blue muscles dilate, lithe
and pliant valves dull. Lunar globes of bulbous
jellyfish glow. Milk.
Green eels twirl in wily spirals of elusive tails.
Adroit lobsters emble darkly olive on shrewd claws down,
where sound comes blunt and Wan, like the bronze tone of a sunken
gong. Wow.
She you have to read her poems a few times, but we'll have it up
on the on your notes. OK, that one takes a bit of
digesting. Yeah, it's I sort of felt it
went dark at the end. Beautiful colour descriptions
and just sensory feelings on that one.
So my poem is Nude Swim by Anne Sexton, an American poet.
On the southwest side of Capri we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were, and we entered it completely and let
our bodies lose all their loneliness.
All the fish in US had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind. We did not disturb their
personal life. We calmly trailed over them and
under them, shedding air bubbles, little white balloons
that drifted up into the sun by the boat where the Italian
boatman slept with his hat over his face.
Water so clear you could read a book through it, Water so
buoyant you could float on your elbow.
I lay on it as on a divan. I lay on it just like Matisse's
red odalisque. Water was my strange flower.
One must picture a woman without a toga or a scarf on a couch as
deep as a tomb. The walls of that grotto were
every color blue. And you said, look, your eyes
are sea colour, look, your eyes are sky colour.
And my eyes shut down as if they were suddenly ashamed.
Oh, I love Anne Sexton. It's very sad, you know, that
both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton both took their own lives
when they were still very young. And as you said earlier, you
know, swimming, drowning, those kind of metaphors are often used
for people having emotional and mental health struggles.
Some those two certainly did, but not and died, but not before
they left us some some really beautiful poems.
Yeah, that's right. And I have.
I have actually been to Capri. I don't think I swam there.
It was a long time ago. But the colours of the water
there are just extraordinary. I've never seen it.
Yeah. Got to go there sometime.
Well, now we have a famous male poet, and we are, he's Irish
too, like Yeats and, umm, another Nobel Prize winner and
umm, in Ireland we simply call him famous Seamus.
But yeah, Seamus Heaney. And the poet is the poem is
called the Otter. When you plunged, the light of
Tuscany wavered and swung through the pool from top to
bottom. I loved your wet head and
smashing crawl, your fine swimmers back and shoulders.
Surfacing and surfacing again. This year and every year since I
sat dry throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me, the mellowed clarities, the grape deep air
thinned and disappointed. Thank God for the slow load
inning when I hold you now we are close and deep as the
atmosphere of water. My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable live Otter of memory, in the pool of the
moment, turning to swim on your back, each silent thigh sharking
kick retilting the light, heaving the cool at your neck,
and suddenly you're out back again, intent as ever, heavy and
frisky in your freshened pelt, printing the stones.
That's gorgeous. I wish I could swim like an
Otter. Yeah, they're such Beautiful
Creatures. My next poem is The Swimmer by
Mary Oliver. All winter the water has crashed
over the cold, the cold sand. Now it breaks over the thin
branch of your body. You plunge down, you swim two or
three strokes. You dream of lingering in the
luminous undertow. But can't you splash through the
bursting white blossoms, the silk sheets?
Gasping, you rise and struggle lightward, finding your way
through the blue ribs back to the sun, and emerge as though
for the first time. Poor fish, poor flesh.
You can never forget. Once every wall was water, the
soft strings filled with a perfect nourishment, pumping
your body full of appetite, elaborating your stubby bones
tucking in like stars. The seeds of restlessness that
made you finally swim toward the world, kicking and shouting but
trailing a mossy darkness, A dream that would never breathe
air and was hinged to your wildest joy like a shadow.
So special. I just love Mary Oliver, you
know, her poems are just full of joy and wild joy and, you know,
depict nature so lovingly. And I can't get enough of her.
Another another wonderful woman poet lost to us recently, but
not under tragic substances. Some, I'm glad to say.
But yeah, she died recently, maybe a year or two ago.
So we're we're coming towards the end already.
It's gone very quickly. So we're going to finish with
some smaller poems or one. The one I'm about to read is
very short, but I love it. It's by Pepper Best, who lives
in the UK and she runs Sea Soul Blessings, which some of the
listeners will be familiar with, and it's called salted.
Those who dip in the sea to start the day are not nuts, they
just feel more ready salted. Make me feel like a peanut.
That's great yeah. And, and the short one that I'm
going to read is by an 8th century Japanese courtesan
called Lady Nakatomi. And you've probably everybody
probably knows about the Pearl divers in, in them Japan and
Korea, the women who free dive down to, to collect oysters,
hoping that they may contain pearls and help feed their
families and all that. So this poem is called Pearl
Diver. And I think of all the poems and
all my I've ever read in my life, this is one of my favorite
Pearl diver. No one dives to the ocean bottom
just like that. One does not learn the skills
involved at the drop of a hat. It's those skills slow learned
in the depths of love that I'm working at Shona.
Not to be outdone by you, I decided awesome, but I'd pen a
few lines of my own to include in the podcast, so would you
indulge me in reading those to finish off?
I would urge you to read it. To read it.
I read it myself and I love it. Yeah, and I know other people
would. So go for it.
Well, this is dedicated to all the women in the Wahini.
Why? Why a swimming group that meets
at Clouds Cove and other places? Winter swims Saturday morning.
Clouds Cove. I should stay home this morning.
It's so cold out there. I have so much to do.
Piles of laundry, my tax return overdue, my still warm bed
beckons. It's so cold out there, all my
unread books reprimanding me. I could fill a hot water bottle,
make a pot of tea. Really I should be doing
something creative or constructive.
Writing a book, even a poem would do.
Finishing those socks I've been knitting for all eternity should
tend my bonsai. Make Persimmon kimchi declutter,
be a mother. I could go out to the market and
shop for persimmons and yuzu while they're still in season.
Return my library books. Also overdue, there's that
Japanese woodblock print exhibition and a friend in need
of soup and sympathy. There are piles of porcini
beneath the pine trees on the city to see walkway.
I could go foraging, get in my steps.
At least I get to see the sea. The clock strikes 10 and then
it's 10:30. I hop in my car and head to
where the Wahini why are gathered.
Treasured wild woman swimming friends.
The ocean is so happy to see us. We shiver and scream as we
sashay in the sea rewards us with kisses.
We play in the waves. Bubble, bubble.
No more landlubber toil or trouble.
Happiness is this. Immersing in the freedom of
forgetfulness on a winter Saturday morning in June.
Finally choosing to follow my bliss.
I love it so much, Sinead. It really captures that feeling
of I couldn't possibly get to the sea today.
You know, I've got so much on my To Do List or I should be doing
this or I should be doing that. And then just making that little
bit of time for ourselves and going and being with friends and
connecting with the water. And then you actually come home
galvanized and you often sort of work through the To Do List
anyway, right? It's just.
That's right. Joy and energy.
It's like filling your tank. Yeah, it's important.
Yeah. And a thought came to me this
morning, Shawna, that really when you're swimming in the sea,
it's, it's it's like a living poem.
You know, you don't actually need words.
Just the act of swimming through the waves is is in itself a
poem. Yeah, that's really beautiful.
And it's sort of like what I said in my poem about you feel
like you're in a watercolor. Yeah.
You feel like you're in a work of art, right, That you're just
part of breathing. And it's beautiful experience,
even in the crazy weather. Yeah, sometimes because you're
in crazy weather. Sometimes the winter swims are
the best. Yeah, definitely.
Get that cold buzz. Well, we've done it.
We've read through all our poems.
We have and that was so much fun, Shona, thank you for
inviting me. Ah, it's a pleasure having you
back on and I hope listeners have enjoyed listening to these
poems as much as we have enjoyed reading them.
I hope so too. So will this lead to a poetry
book? Sinead.
Oh well, we. We should definitely get some
kind of anthology of swimming poems together.
Shona I. I'm sure there is one, but maybe
one that's focused on the swimming poetry of of our
theoroa. Yeah.
That's a joint, a joint, a joint venture maybe for the future.
Exactly. We don't have the door today.
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