Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We have moved once to accommodate the tide
on this August strand, crowded with many
who otherwise would have been in the Algarve
or on some island in the Aegean.
At least the sands are free this year of the Christians
whose jocular misanthropy of games
of tug o’ war takes up so much space.
High tide is still nine minutes away,
and the beach here rises just perceptibly –
but ramparts have gone, and a castle keep.
Someone has placed a child’s spade in the sand
guessing where the flow will end,
At the edge of the waves, as the tide flows
and the beach is gradually deserted,
a young woman wearing a hijab,
dressed for a rainy day at the seaside,
watches, concerned, as her grandfather,
a perfunctory beard on his long
Mughal chin, smiling, with horn-rimmed glasses,
in his Ralph Lauren green and white polo shirt,
trousers rolled high, up to his knees in water,
using a Kashmiri technique he has seen
on YouTube, casts – into the sky –
The purple, jagged rocks on the island’s shore
were molten lava from volcanoes –
mere craters for aeons now – across the straits,
and limestone boulders in the hinterland
the slow detritus of the last ice age.
RAF Typhoons have flown from their air base,
ten miles or so from here, every day,
leaving the island with their stormy thunder,
over the mountainous Llyn Peninsula
out into the north east Atlantic,
as if it were quite another sea.
At the end of a dull August afternoon,
two little girls, sisters perhaps, in hijabs,
and a stocky boy of ten or so,
and two women, probably their mother
and grandmother, dressed in woollen hijabs
and abayas, are preparing to picnic.
They lay out a tartan rug, and Tesco bags,
on that part of the Green closed to vehicles:
between the low stone wall – beyond which
is the narrow walk along the sea wall,
and occasional notices of bye laws
strictly prohibiting the feeding of gulls –
Caernavon Bay is below, and to the west
the Irish Sea. The restive winds and waves
are lulled now to a breath, to a swell.
In the distance the London-Holyhead train
crosses the causeway. A multi-decked ferry
from Dublin is entering the harbour.
After the Druids hid, and the Romans left,
there came a multitude of saints, mostly
martyrs, not infrequently princesses,
renowned in death for healing the heart’s anguish.
St Gwenfaen – ‘Blessed White Rock’ –
As usual Uncle Tacko is trundling
his Flea Circus to the end of the pier,
and the Island Princess is embarking
for a trip up the Straits and around
Ynys Seiriol with its nesting puffins,
its elderberry woodland purpling.
And the dogged chambers of my heart, open
and close, open, close, like an harmonium.
All the familiar sounds – the Flea Circus crowd,
the paddlers in the pool, the revellers
on the hotel lawn next door –
ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020
ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020
ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020
ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020
ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020