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Mary MacRae

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Seaside

Everything’s made small here by the sky,
and its rip-roaring wind that presses on the eye

blinds us with salt, so that we only see
through a film, a jerky home-made movie

of scuttering birds - sandpiper, sanderling? -
pale as ghosts by the lip of the sea, nothing

that’s high or dry, even what’s washed up
in tide-line heaps - beer bottles, bits of rope,

bird-bones like twigs and driftwood bleached like bone.
You’d need to have wings or fins to feel at home

in this constant boom on the shingle’s shift and tug.
But against the sky a line of beach-huts hug

the last tumble of stones, as square and small
as pastel-coloured postage-stamps, all

stuck down for winter. Later in the year
they’ll open up like dolls’ houses, with chairs

and tables, kettles, mugs - faded pink
Beano comic strips in fuzzy ink

or messages to us from somewhere near,
picture-postcards scrawled, ‘Wish you were here’.

 

Mary MacRae lives in London and writes full time. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines.

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