Most poems about the sea want to show its power. D. L. Emblen's "Change of Tide at Mission Beach Bridge" does something stranger and gentler: it catches the exact moment when the sea stops. The subject is slack water, that brief pause when the tide has finished going out or coming in and the whole bay seems to hold its breath. What makes the poem memorable is how it turns that pause into a small drama, with a final image so quiet it almost slips past.
The opening line sets the scene with a faint sense of hurry: "The last small wave is hurried through." The wave is not simply moving; it is rushed along, "drawn splashing and struggling in between the walls of the channel." The verbs are all done to the wave rather than by it. It is "drawn," "snatched," "tossed," and the phrase "without ceremony" makes the process sound almost rude, as if the water were being handled by an impatient clerk. The poem then reveals what the wave has been delivered to: "the shallow, widening bay." The line itself widens, running long and loose as though spilling into open space. Even the geography is built into the rhythm. The channel is tight and struggling; the bay is spacious and calm.
Then comes the poem's most surprising move. A figure appears, "the one in charge of tides, of storms, of lonely sand spits and lost seagulls." Emblen never names this being, and the list that describes it is wonderful: it begins with grand forces (tides, storms) and slides into small, forlorn things (sand spits, a lost seagull). This is a keeper of both the huge and the overlooked. The poem also hesitates over what kind of presence this is. He "blows a soothing breath / or smiles commandingly." That "or" matters, and so does the oxymoron of a smile that commands. The speaker seems unsure whether the calm arrives through tenderness or through authority, and the poem leaves both possibilities open.
The central image follows: the unseen figure "takes the palms of his hands and presses the water out flat / and holds it there, with both arms around, / as one might hold a platter of cream / until there is no fear of spilling any of it." Here the vast bay shrinks to something you could carry across a kitchen. Cream is a precise choice. It is thick, pale, and precious, and the worry about spilling it is a very ordinary, domestic worry. Setting a godlike force against such a humble anxiety is the poem's quiet joke and its tenderness at once. It suggests that the power behind the tides is not only mighty but careful.
Structurally, the poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines vary widely, from the short, measured "blows a soothing breath" to the sprawling catalogue of tides and sand spits, so the rhythm behaves like water itself, surging in some places and settling in others. The lack of rhyme suits the subject too; nothing clicks shut neatly. Instead the poem slows as it approaches its ending, and the last two lines are the stillest of all.
That ending is where the poem proves its worth. "The green bay water is so still / that a feather from a mud hen's wing makes circles, / as a stone makes circles in a mountain lake." Look at the scale. A feather, nearly weightless, produces the same ripples as a stone. The stillness is so complete that the smallest thing registers. The comparison to a mountain lake also carries the reader away from the beach altogether, to somewhere high and silent.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to be loud. It finds wonder in an event most people walk past on a bridge, and it suggests that calm is not an absence but an achievement, something that has to be held in place with both arms.