SHALLOWS END (aubade to a beach hut)

Long years secure on shingle bank,

at this margin you have lingered

watching how clouds gather,

then breaking, pass.

Memory, through swash of waves unceasing,

has been in pebbles piled up here.

 

Repaired, repainted every spring

and coolest number in the row,

B-52 now rides the shore.

Revetments gone, rotten past safekeeping,

the stones are dredged

by fetch of storms set free.

 

Reaching close and closer still our apron,

each tide reshapes the beach.

This time is sooner than foreseen:

the power of backwash -

creating coasts elsewhere -

we never noticed it before.

 

v. 2021

 

FLORA/FAUNA Volume One 

OUR SOLE SURVIVOR?

https://www.hsj.co.uk/quality-and-performance/government-counts-mailouts-to-hit-100000-testing-target/7027544.article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56145492 

So – like an interminable drone

of phone-on-hold muzak –

Right Honourable member for Potemkin West,

you were kept, from one Handcock-up to the next

hanging on by your lizard fingertips.

 

In the build-back-better days to come

you shall not be remembered,

even as Bozo’s useful monkey.

Rather your ‘mate’ down the pub –

grown fat on the contract

you slipped him under the counter –

will reconsider.

                           Come to think

your brain, your past, your skin

and your future to be

the colour and consistency

of stale wallpaper paste.

And, after all, about as much use.

 

vi. 2021

 

PRESENTS

 

I am using up what we could not bear

to throw away in house clearance:

the smell of your chic shower gel

is rosemary for remembrance.

We guess you took pleasure in its fragrance

but never got to ask. And never gave

this hand-made honey, eaten now

but never spread on toast to savour

at your garden window. Those plants held dear,

whose names I never did recall

from one told visit to the next:

almost to the end you could name them all.

 

v.2021

 

fridge poem for May Day 21