Along the Shore, a poem

I was reminded of this by a friend on facebook today in reference to my second novel, Five Days in Ballyboy Beach, just accepted by Tirgearr Publishing.  It is also, sadly, appropriate from the less romantic viewpoint of the amount of rubbish swirling round in the ocean – a paper just the other days suggested that melting arctic ice would release trillions of tiny pieces of plastic back into the water.

 

Along the Shore

 

 

I walked along the shore

Searching for stories,

And saw from the tide line there

Was no shortage of them:

 

A small apple, still intact,

Discarded from a recent

Cider-pressing at a nearby orchard,

Taken by the rain down a drainage ditch;

 

A balloon, lost by a boy

Who stared skywards, crying

As it sailed out of sight

Inside the blue, at

The truth of his father’s words

That it would fly away if he let go

More than at the loss of his toy;

 

The arm and lens-less frame of

A former pair of pink, heart-shaped sunglasses

Lost from a inflatable boat

Bouncing over the Caribbean,

Bought in a stall in the resort

At two in the morning by a gentleman

After travelling from a Guangdong factory;

 

A piece of string – a balled up knot of

Baling twine – tied to a gate on a mountain farm

In place of a hinge that had long since rusted off

And fallen into the mossy rocks,

Until it wore through with use,

Taken by the wind to the river

There to flow towards the ocean

Entwined in twigs and tree trunks

Till they too, rotted away, then

Enticing turtles as if tentacles;

 

Seaweed, streams of it, several hues of

Green and brown clumps covered in sand

Some curling as they desiccate, smelling of

Sea and the denizens of the deep,

Symbolising and indicating some

Small piece of the unseen reaches beneath

The lapping waves, wondrous, dangerous

Violent and intense as any city-street.