New Poetry by Susan Wallace: Drawing the Shade.

English: Ripples in the sand. The beach at Newborough at low tide. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Drawing the shade

This beach is never blank.

In spite of the wind’s whip and the swipe of the waves

It lies under sky like an open page,

Its ridged lines written by the tide

As though the moon has pressed her frowning forehead to the sand.

Here bladderwrack spells out darkly

In gothic script the water-logged names of the sea;

And the dot-dash of cockle and razor shell

Encodes a secret, deep and salty.

The pattern of runes printed by sea-birds’ feet is untranslatable.

We and our shadows walk the shore.

Yours is short and never still. Mine,

A measure of my days, stretches long to the West.

Seabirds, circling, freckle the sand with shade.

I throw my arms wide, hair a halo in the east wind

And you begin to draw 

With your spade around the shape my shadow makes. 

The plastic blade slices wet sand. Your small hand

Cannot hold the line, swerving out of true.

You make a botch of me. We laugh, and race towards the sea.

And this is what the years will do.

Some time distant you will half-recall the day,

The beach whose mysteries we pondered; and Grandma -  

Outline wavering, face no longer clear – 

Sketched in sand between one tide and the next.

Copyright : Susan Wallace 2014

Meet the Poets: Susan Wallace.

                                                   Susan Wallace

Susan enjoyed poetry at school but then got distracted by other things for about fifty years.

During these decades she has taught and researched in the UK and overseas; published more than a dozen works of non-fiction; edited Oxford’s Dictionary of Education; and is currently Emeritus Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University.

She admires particularly the work of Larkin, Betjeman and U.A. Fanthorpe. 

Her own poetry, which  has been published in a number of journals and anthologies, has been described as  ‘neatly faceted and rich in slant rhyme.’