The Indian Ocean

Just a Perfect Day, just like the perfect way Lou sung songs of sangria for: deep, black sleep – no dreams, no allegories to clean… only the unending depths of rest carried through towards the light of mango dawn woken wide with espresso and friends’ laughter… Stretched out in sunshine, dreaming of sleep on Cottesloe sands, the songs of Krishna blue call in steady waves of azure – the same silk waters that Robert Edouard-Heart wrote his poems for, far from here, looking out across the Indian Ocean from his Mauritian home…those sacred, sunlit waters, gin-soaked and sapphired, emerald and clean…

Tous les songes d’Asie,                       All the dreams of Asia,

tous les parfums d’Afrique,                 All the perfumes of Africa,

toute la poésie

chimérique                                          All the chimeric poetry

me viennent ce soir avec cette brise    Comes to me tonight

de la Mer Indienne.                             with the breeze of the Indian Ocean.

In front of the Indiana Teahouse I watch wave upon wave wash ashore.  Waves move in on heavy sighs, crash flat on sand in claps of silence.  Again and again, and again.  Out at sea, dancing sunlight cools on a morning breeze.  Ships and distant shorelines fade from view.  The shimmering blues move through the colours of ocean, so clear from where I look. This beautiful, beautiful ocean – there is no ocean like the Indian Ocean; linking lands, joining continents, merging the common prayers of all people and all religions together through an exchange of language, coastline and the narratives we all share.  There is no ocean like the Indian Ocean.

A faint breeze drifts in, cooling wet skin, still warm with sunshine surrounding it.  The sea is so clear, so pure, so flat today, so calm, so sunlit, so alive – moving with curves, curling with swirls, movement hypnotic for a moment, for a lifetime.  Far out in the deep beyond, just in front of me, just in front of Rottnest Island, a solitary tall, white sail glides past in silence, arching along the horizon’s crescent moon.

And then beneath the aqua marine: weightless, breathless, silence.  Curtains of sunlight billow and move through the jades, through the gin, through the Krishna blue.  Now is the dream.