The reddish cliffs of the Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick offer another spectacular landscape in which to experience Fundy’s tides.

Hopewell Rocks

I left my footprints on the ocean floor,

Knowing they would be no more

When Fundy’s tide has swept them clean.

No trace that I have been

Standing in the mud and sand

Gazing at this Wonderland

Of sculpted rocks and fissures deep,

Where rushing waters come and sweep

With relentless force of spray

All the yesterdays away.

I wondered then, “Who came before?”

How many other footprints on the ocean floor?

Or was there once an upward thrust

When ocean floor turned into mountain crust.

Did dinosaurs then in murderous play,

Leave their victims in the clay?

Again perhaps, more recently

When land was covered by invading sea,

A fish swam slowly down to rest

On self-same spot my foot will press,

And musing thus, it came to me

That we are children of the sea.

Twas long before the age of man;

A creature left the ocean floor

To make its home on solid shore,

But locked within its memory

Was its bondage to the sea.

That sea comes crashing over sand and stone

Claiming what it calls its own.

I left my footprints on the ocean floor

Knowing they would be no more

When Fundy’s tide has swept them clean.

By: Elizabeth D’Ambrosio 2012

(Published previously in: Twigs & Leaves. Volume V. 2012, Broken Rules Press)

Elizabeth D’Ambrosio was born in Germany in 1920 and immigrated to Canada as a child. A member of the Greenwood Poets since 2009, she regales her audiences with humorous poems as well as those that move the spirit and strike at heartstrings. Elizabeth is an avid speechwriter, bridge player, traveller, and painter. Her editorials and poetry have been published in the Montreal Gazette, on CBC, on the poetry website www.poetsagainstwar.ca , and in several chapbooks, namely, “Passages,” published by the Greenwood Centre for Living History, “Twigs & Leaves” published by Broken Rules Press, and Memories, a self-publication.