Teal feeding from the mud
creek whose trickle snakes
a lazy way along the runnel
of its draining...
The sun,
a palest disc, rides a thinning,
and around a rough of cloud
spreads illuminating beams
on field-edge lines of trees, and reaches
Holme church tower,
it's squat, square bulk enduring.
Wind blows from the bay over
the marshes with a faint salt tang
and hint of mist.
On our
left, the seagate lee, the fresh
marsh fawn rushes and their sienna
brown heads ruffle gently on the Hun's
long backwater ditches where, cladding,
they make soft convexities of
widening and pooling.
By the dune boardwalk, bleached
marram waves - and see now
the seawaves in train, whose roar we heard,
raised to breaking foam-rushed
onshore blusters.
We walk in death:
the pinewood path
shows all the wood to seaward dying fast.
These tangled curls of pine twigs
hold no green needles, only
thinned brown corpses
mummified by the salt wind.
That storm last year, which washed
a leading line of pines to beach,
wrecked on their gnarl-bare roots,
inundation-sickened irremediably
a wide swathe. 'And so it goes.'*
Unprotected from the raw onshore
we pull jumper-ends from coats,
over our knuckles
to mitigate the chill.
The waves rise irresistibly,
curl their green backs, barred over
into marbled breakers;
the swash white-tiger furs out
a wide-spread skin,
gathers a lip of foam.
Clinkered by the wind
it trembles and shivers its sick,
prismatic bubbles at the stranded edge.
Paler than a high full moon, the sun,
traverse of thinner cloud acknowledges.
We stumble back over a ridge
of wuthered dune, begin
to feel our fingers smarting once again.
....................
*Kurt Vonnegut's famous catchphrase.
YOU ARE READING
Greenclad.
PoesíaIvy-jacketed, December oaks on road-borders shock their stark gestures at us now, through sun and sleet, that January will yawn at and February, propping eyelids, will desperately ignore, longing for blossom; and making do with the least of anything...
