And then in a paradise of sea & boats
the surf ran its sloppy debris up
OK, not dark native mud, just sand
polished clean as words, as bones
we play upon once and ever
Cast up at Broadstairs yet again
oh, family things – you know, that compulsion
paint peels then slowly renewed
but the foreign students wander yet
– lost on the same maps
circumstances do come round again
edges softened & removed through rolling erosions
picked over continually by gulls & ravens
fr a late-blooming career at Thanet Cat Shelter
helping run workshops in the new Town Shed
yes! all boons to elderly gentlemen & blokes
the sea & the sun cast us all up here
daily patrolling The Esplanade w/ ice creams
childhood repeated more slowly this time
even français: oo-where is thee boating-poule?
please sirr? no matter
stick w/ the seagulls & do what you do
Let’s play on the bouncy castle first!
it’s a fine tall young giraffe we see
tenderly holding us & uplifting lightly
I could believe
(if I wasn’t dead
it was just birth I’d come through not
all the slow mucky stuff at this end
Let’s catch the bubbles though!
they’re birds & worlds & words & brief
yes, like all of this, fat slippery
membranes holding nothing from nothing
Time – – no, not for nothing here
it’s all gone, long gone, a dream
that this wasn’t a dream, or that praise
will still buy us out from somewhere where
there isn’t an out:
the world here
alone & fragile now as always
Brutish it is, then brutish it must be
we can all start again at Totnes – oh
real mud along the Dart, smelling of nutmeg
are we lowly or just the dead giants?
yeah, both I guess & the mud not
as much spicy as oozily vital
Poets, you poets haven’t any age
not any more than tidal litter
it’s a grand life beached up here
planning on our next break through
we’re all food for sandhoppers, son
daughter, all the other people gathered up
is this the really The Esplanade?
at last & at here, attention then
“we can all start again at Totnes” – surely you know that Britain was founded & named after Brute the Trojan, who landed (with his other gallant asylum seekers fleeing oppression in Turkey & travelling via Italy), at Totnes, slew the giants who inhabited the land and took possession of it (as we have done so often since)? The evidence is there at Fore Street in the Brutus Stone on which our ancestral hero alighted. Did they really not teach you that at school? Do read Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.