Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

(A recent study from Sussex University claimed that limpets were partly responsible for the cliff erosion on the South coast.)

Storm time, the sea spits stones, like a nut eater breaking shells
but fails to split their roundness into bitter flints, with flat faces
- black and traced - hard eggs inside: it wants to cut the kindness
of the stones outsides, the smooth cupped prickle,
wallowed on a marine tongue, into an ancient map of conflict:
Earth-wide, vast, and a boast from the violent solid to the eternal liquid.

In the storm, kisses exchange the matter of two mediums, nails scratch
back over beaches, cliffs and artificial ground: soil and water throw
their differences at one another. ( A wooden changing hut is human,
quietly hiding behind stooped shoulders, hoping the truth will pass.
Kisses exchange. Lips lick tender, as predators on corpses before the bite.
Juice and flesh, move and stand, in versions of destruction.

On the cliff reach, its own, sliced looking, hanging on, white under green:
the grass stuck In chalk and surviving, height offers a false safety,
as the sun smokes off the dew and dry day shows off cracks in the mud
which will lean both ways; the limpets eat the calcium - small incursions
cost the coast - the land will be sucked into their shells in an unforeseen
flow of erosion, those hard, wet pads, destroy the firmness they need to
                                                                                                   cling to.