One Mile Inland
POETRY: Waves roar. Distance whispers. Intimacy echoes.
A chilly, still autumnal day,
there’s me,
there’s you,
a sweeping bay.
We both stand, one mile inland
from a breaking wave that soaks the sand,
a surf that washes rocks, a store
of energy – a foaming roar
that bounces ’round storm-sculpted cliffs
and rises high, it coils and lifts
its constant, simmered roll of sound
across the fields, through air, to where
we’re separately to be found.
The whisper tiptoes in our hair,
disturbs the birdsong twittered there
and we both smile, a mile apart
this rumble-thread, wind-tumbled dart
that speaks of giant-natured grace,
unites us in our heart-locked place.
It never rests, there’s wave on wave,
the sea has neither birth nor grave,
we simply chance to hear its flights
of noisy song on quiet nights,
then we shall sleep, our love serene
as harbour lights’ enduring beam.
AS THE CROW FLIES – or as it would fly if the coastal “breeze” wasn’t battering it into flapping zig-zags, its silhouette shape-shifting like a tiny demon – I live a mile inland from the sea. On summer evenings the coast road is a cop-dodging motorcycle racetrack. The soundscape: engines stepping rapidly up through 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th until they reach the corner by the death-trap bridge. Then, d’zoooooo…d’zooo…d’zoo as the alarmed deceleration makes the front wheel dip deep on its springs, the rear glides an inch off the ground, and the rider breathes hard, grip tightening with a fast-rising hope that their brakes hold true and the air-ambulance won’t be coming out today. I can hear this combustion-engine rise-and-fall from my doorway, but it’s a fair-weather sport. On less clement evenings the riders take the angry-wasp fizzle of their Hondas, Royal Enfields and Triumphs elsewhere, and an undertone emerges: the pure call of the ocean over the mile of fields, lanes, hedges and downs, a constant rolling rumble rumble RUMBLE rumble rumble on the south-westerly wind. Along ten miles of shore there is salt water, seaweed, smoothed pebbles, cuttlebone, pieces of fishing net, the bodies of barrel jellyfish, fossilised crocodile-teeth that have migrated on tectonic plates from Portugal, and occasional flotsam from the heavy freighter-traffic of the English Channel. All of it, the whole churning thousand-tons-per-second mass, is being thrown onto the sand and scraping its way back, on and back, on and back, its roar growling up the cliffs and out across the farmland. Down on the beach the sound is gentler, more rhythmical, but still potent and endless. And so, this poem. On the mighty hulking ocean. On the connection to home. On the breeze that carries the barrage of sound. On the way that two people who are apart can hear the same comforting thing that draws them together, is shared, is beyond their control, and is so epically huge and yet so constant that they barely tune into it at all. We are so gracefully and thoroughly enveloped by the natural world.
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Photograph by me.
That poem trips lively off the tongue.
What a photo, Ian. We are all drawn to the beach, and we can speak of it endlessly, it seems. It seems to hold questions and answers to everything, speaking in some strange penetrating way.
Was this reflective of a recent experience? If so, where?