A Norfolk April
We struggle to keep upright,
walking along the sea wall, inches
above angry, bran waves, racing hard,
fast before the cruel-cold of a north-easter;
they break, dirty-white and dangerous,
against the stone wanderers,
imported to defend the coast,
or slap, relentless, against
stoic, thick-planked groynes
stretched between their metal supports,
spotted like an old man's arms
rusted by too much sun.
In the troughs
innocent marbling
gentle froth forming
dissolving swiftly
taking on the power
of racing crests.
Further out, taller end-posts drown quietly,
Gormley figures resigned to their fate.
Still further, the horizon's razor-cut;
deep-sea indigo spills into the sky beyond sight.
Man's work in digging, the sea's in rising -
a blurring of boundaries, a landscape at mercy,
where tides make uneasy those who live where they touch,
eyes casting constantly to combinations
of seasons, the moon, the winds,
creating a rushing, spilling, tree-salting force
which turns fresh water brackish, soaks doubt into hamlets
abandoned to sea-swallow and planners' priorities.
Across column-ploughed fields,
crisp-bordered by hedging,
we see the clear-edged certainty
of flint and stone towers,
churched to the heavens,
pointing to salvation for lost congregations.
© Paul Mein 1/5/15
We struggle to keep upright,
walking along the sea wall, inches
above angry, bran waves, racing hard,
fast before the cruel-cold of a north-easter;
they break, dirty-white and dangerous,
against the stone wanderers,
imported to defend the coast,
or slap, relentless, against
stoic, thick-planked groynes
stretched between their metal supports,
spotted like an old man's arms
rusted by too much sun.
In the troughs
innocent marbling
gentle froth forming
dissolving swiftly
taking on the power
of racing crests.
Further out, taller end-posts drown quietly,
Gormley figures resigned to their fate.
Still further, the horizon's razor-cut;
deep-sea indigo spills into the sky beyond sight.
Man's work in digging, the sea's in rising -
a blurring of boundaries, a landscape at mercy,
where tides make uneasy those who live where they touch,
eyes casting constantly to combinations
of seasons, the moon, the winds,
creating a rushing, spilling, tree-salting force
which turns fresh water brackish, soaks doubt into hamlets
abandoned to sea-swallow and planners' priorities.
Across column-ploughed fields,
crisp-bordered by hedging,
we see the clear-edged certainty
of flint and stone towers,
churched to the heavens,
pointing to salvation for lost congregations.
© Paul Mein 1/5/15
Hi Paul……superb poem. All that roving and dangerous movement captured with such clarity and then the 'certainty' of the land with a hint of threat in the word 'lost'……...
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