Between two and three o’clock in the
morning was also the time when dreams refused to be drowned, but when the heart
slowed in its beating, packed in sand, heavy, like a sack of pipis brought in
with the tide and stranded when the tide went out, as tides do, hanging
placards on the shore for the comfort of those who haunt beaches who keep
returning again and again to make sure what the tide is up to, what gifts it
has strewn on the sand, whether it is at home, in bed, asleep, complaining,
raging, raking up the past or the dead, letting the matter rest, avoiding the
issue, or whether it had got tired of sitting brooding on the cheerless hearth
and has put on its green cloak and gone out to do destruction—murder or love…
Quotation: Scented Gardens for the Blind. Janet Frame, 1963
