Walking home

Poetry published in Meniscus Volume 13 Issue 2

Holidays at Kangaroo Island are one of the many excellent things that have entered my life since I met my wife. Her parents live at Penneshaw, where the ferry comes in. Both of them are penguin guides at the Penneshaw Penguin Centre, and this poem is inspired by the way they walk home after finishing their tours.

Thank you to Jen Webb, Deb Wain and Sarah Giles, editors at Meniscus, for publishing this work, along with its winter solstice companion, in their Volume 13 Issue 2.

Thanks also to Mark Tredinnick. It was in his masterclass, What the Light Tells, that this poem took its first steps out into the world.

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Walking home

After the evening penguin tour at Hog Bay in Penneshaw, Kangaroo Island, on a summer solstice

I walk my way around the restful bay,
    my bare feet on the white and still-warm sand,
this cloudless night is leading me astray;
    I hold the endless stars inside my hand—
a slippery skein of all that’s yet to be.
    The moon, a quivering pillar of silver sea,
suspends this longest day in front of me

    and pulls me out into the bay with you.
Rivers of memories all connected here.
    Wavelets tickle my back and neck. On cue
you trickle in between my toes. A tear,
    so dark and sweet as treacle flows—this weir
we call a life may stay the river’s tow,
    but my bones and blood are in the overflow.

From Frenchman’s Rock I look back to the beach.
    The endless waves goodbye, and life reckons
with something big, but just beyond my speech;
    outside my reach, like solstice moonlight beckons
to the sea. The sandy shore and ocean
    smile white and black, just like a crescent moon:
this longest day will come again too soon.

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This gallery of photographs gives a flavour of the poem’s final stanza. Each photograph was anonymously contributed to CoastSnap, the citizen science coastline monitoring initiative. There is an official CoastSnap spot right at Frenchman’s Rock. The photographs are dated 24 October 2025, 12 February 2025, 31 August 2025, 7 July 2025, 6 July 2025 and 30 April 2025. I’ll be on The Island for the southern hemisphere’s 2025 summer solstice and will make sure I add another photograph then.

Six views of Hog Bay from Frenchman’s Rock, Penneshaw, Kangaroo Island. Credit: CoastSnap.