Thickened by the tired air
Sticky with ripened fruit
Slow, pitch black, distorted, stretched
Beyond recognition
These shadows of ours
Run out
Black rivers
Bleeding the last of summer’s heat
From our veins
Onto the misted ground
Into the thin air of autumn
Warmth no longer from within
We become reptilian
Bask on the cool stones
Of an empty beach
Where the skin-deep solar glow
Drains with the ebb tide
We hold the last of harvest gold
In our joined hands
.
CLP 20/09/2019
Aloft on a waft
To drop mollusc on shingle
Did gulls teach or learn?
.
n.b. It is fascinating to watch gulls and crows rise 3 or 4 metres on the breeze with the intention of dropping a shelled shore-dweller onto the pebbled beach repeatedly until the shell cracks open and the meaty interior is accessible. When I mentioned this to my step-father, Frank Hawes, I had presumed the seabirds got the idea first. He said, “Maybe the gulls copied the crows.”
CLP 03/01/2019
Can you hear them?
Through the rain
Distinct from rushing breakers
Un-natural metallic
Clanks, clanging, rattles, clunks
A pile-driver knocking in new posts
Mechanical digger scraping shingle
Down on the beach
As tides permit
To a generator’s constant beat
Under floodlights
Trying to stave off darkness
As well as the inexorable rise of the oceans.
.
CLP 19/12/2018
Walking the dog on the only dry day of the week
East along the beach with the tide reluctantly rolling backwards
A two layer skein of brent geese speed past going west
From Clymping toward Pagham Harbour’s muddy grazing
Seen then gone in two minutes or less
The geese and full sun wake him and memories tumble out
Walking in step, we negotiate the dripping, barnacled groynes
His black labrador begging for attention with a new found sodden tennis ball
As he tells me of his life fishing
Not a word about his work from which he retired
Black bream, flat fish, eels and the Sargasso Sea
A memory of bait from a single rock pool that would last a day’s fishing
He has a boat and goes out when he can
He is still that boy who’d run from Woodingdean to Rottingdean to fish
There’s been talk of a move inland when he gets older, but he will
Never grow old, nor move from the sea.
.
CLP 30/11/2018
