Low Tide at St. Andrews
(New Brunswick)
The long red flats stretch open to the sky,
Breathing their moisture on the August air.
The seaweeds cling with flesh-like fingers where
The rocks give shelter that the sands deny;
And wrapped in all her summer harmonies
St. Andrews sleeps beside her sleeping seas.
The far-off shores swim blue and indistinct,
Like half-lost memories of some old dream.
The listless waves that catch each sunny gleam
Are idling up the waterways land-linked,
And, yellowing along the harbour's breast,
The light is leaping shoreward from the west.
And naked-footed children, tripping down,
Light with young laughter, daily come at eve
To gather pulse and sea clams and then heave
Their loads, returning laden to the town,
Leaving a strange grey silence when they go,—
The silence of the sands when tides are low.
From Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (The Musson Book Co., Limited, 1917) by Emily Pauline Johnson. This poem is in the public domain.
Emily Pauline Johnson
Emily Pauline Johnson, who also published under her paternal grandfather’s Mohawk name Tekahionwake (“double wampum”), was born on March 10, 1861, on the Six Nations Reserve, Canada West. She was the fourth and youngest child born to George Henry Martin Johnson (Onwanonsyshon), a Mohawk who was both a hereditary and elected chief of the Six Nations. Johnson’s father was fluent in six Indigenous languages, which allowed him to work as a translator. Johnson’s mother, Emily Susanna Howells, was an English-born Canadian from Bristol. Johnson’s father died in 1884.