Step lightly on this coastal strip, and watch
for the sucking, shifting salt-and-pepper sand.
Watch, too, for the rising, curling breaker,
the cliff’s overburden, twitching in space on a rusting wire.
This beach reaches in a frown for a town’s light
and its majesty is its plainness and its wheeling birds.
It was here, dug deep in grey driftwood, I etched
a name: a declaration by the licking water, and
where the salted grass hangs low.
I fancy now it’s gone;
set free by circumstance and time
Thanks, Peter. Did this after a scuttle up the Mid Canterbury coast recently. The words were on the breeze.
I agree with Susannah, John. That image of the rusting wire ‘twitching’ up there on the bluff catches the mind. How many of us have scratched such names; I go and have a look on a sandstone cliff I’ve known since childhood for my brother’s name he dug out (deeply I thought then) some 40 years ago. Sometimes I imagine I can still see it there. Love that line about the ‘beach reach(ing) in a frown for a town’s light’; I was trying to write something like this a while ago, but couldn’t find the words – look like you found them!
Kind of you to say.
Beautiful imagery here – I especially love;
‘Step lightly on this coastal strip, and watch
for the sucking, shifting salt-and-pepper sand.
Watch, too, for the rising, curling breaker,
the cliff’s overburden, twitching in space on a rusting wire.
This beach reaches in a frown for a town’s light’