Lavernock
There's a moment of pure stillness
between one wave and the next
when the silence in the heart is amplified.
It must have been an interval
like this - a pause in the heaving
of the stacked and waiting tide -
when the first words were transmitted
from a station near this point
then sent out to the island,
skimming waves across the sound.
I loved it but I had to leave behind
the chapel with its green, sea-tarnished bell
and take the path that leads you down
between sparse dune-grass and a broken fence
then brings you out and under
the horizon's curving rim
to meet with someone's double
where the cliffs disintegrate.
What did he give me as I halted there
to rifle through the shingle
for a blue-veined souvenir?
What can a stranger give you
on a stretch of empty shore
when you've been rendered silent
by the fullness of it all
unless he says before you had the chance
the selfsame things you might have said
about the exact colour of the sand -
if the words you'd been given
had fallen right - or how the tide
had gathered up its weight
to make one final push against the land
which lies subdued and waiting
for the surge it can't resist;
then turns like a soldier on his heel
to scale the rampart for a final look
and time begins again? I feared
the chapel and its rusted cross
had sunk into the headland
and were gone; that my lover and her sister
who had waited on the brink
had driven from the cliff-top, also gone.
I scrambled up into the fading light.
The distant ridge came clear.
What he gave me was permission to go on.
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The