Dan Guenther: ‘Reflections along the Thames Estuary’, ‘The Wild Hive’ and ‘Meditation on Three Humpbacks Returning off Kurnell’

Reflections along the Thames Estuary

In this out-of-the-way marshy corner of northern Kent
the scavenging eels return from the sea,
gathering in dense reed beds
just beyond that bend
in the channel between Oare and the Isle of Sheppey,
the place where your cousin and her betrothed
capsized as they sailed out upon the Thames.

Fishermen found her sailboat adrift along the coast,
and you found their headstones behind St Peter’s Church,
the details of their drownings a matter
of two tidal streams called Fate and Time,
one wide and the other deep,
converging in stygian darkness,
their eel-ravaged remains recovered at the confluence.

Her elegant letters to your grandmother,
written before WW II,
describe golden plovers, avocets, and redshanks
during their estuarine migrations southward,
and how local diggings revealed a Roman presence,
their stone paths among the tussocks of wild flax
still used by secretive lovers and elusive foxes.

A venerable oak arches over their graves,
and as the first birds murmur
in this grey hour before daybreak,
you listen to the faint cry of a bittern
lamenting those places where the marsh grass
has become open water once again,
lost to the broadening, flushing tides.

Dan Guenther

Meditation on Three Humpbacks Returning off Kurnell

Up from unknown paths within the depths
a pod of three barnacled adults emerges
out of the dark swells,
once again arriving at Kurnell’s sandstone cliffs
on their migratory trek,
guided by a shared memory
and familiar sonic echoes
bouncing off the peninsular headland.

Driving home, you listen to a cassette tape
of their haunting voices lost in rapture,
wondering if humpback whales channel
various epochs of their ancient past,
each song a hymn yearning for by-gone worlds,
part of a concert held for all cetaceans,
one heard simultaneously throughout the oceans
and in praise of the divine.

Dan Guenther

The Wild Hive

The day after I returned from Vietnam lightning struck
a massive elm in what remained of my father’s woods,
the fissure left by the strike
revealing a hive of feral bees,
the scale of their refuge
evoking a medieval citadel’s dark chambers.

Multiple layers of honeycomb
had evolved over the decades,
an accumulation
not unlike a heavily impastoed canvas,
one worked upon by an artist over a lifetime,
and inspiring awe on the part of the beholders.

My brooding father pulled apart that sublime interior,
freeing uneven swathes of stored honey
with lateral slices of his long-bladed knife,
the darker shades of amber said
to be unique pollen signatures from past seasons,
wetter years yielding more golden hues.

The honey of many generations dripped away
like blood from a mortal wound
where further treatment offered little comfort,
and the swarm gathered along the elm’s split trunk
as if ready to emigrate elsewhere from a tree
already ancient when my father was a boy.

Dan Guenther