Aldeburgh Beach
This morning the waves are restless.
Underneath them things are living out their lives.
Pebbles are piled up at the sea-edge
as if trickled from a huge hand.
Each one has its own genealogy,
a parent rock, a place it has travelled from.
The fine rain is almost horizontal.
I breathe it in, dissolve it into my blood.
The sea is happiest as froth, stretching out
its fingers, skipping faster, making shapes.
When it bangs itself onto the shore
it feels a release
as if moving its shoulder-blades diagonally
one way and then the other.
by Fiona Robyn
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Categories: Water
!!! How wonderful.
I like this. I have been obsessed with the beach since my trip to Cape Cod last week. Tried to bring some sand home in a bottle, but it’s just not the same.
This is handsome, Fiona!
Your poem might be a response to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach: your first line is that poem’s first line’s antithesis, and, while your poem also captures the pebbles and the spray, it remains in the here and now. Your sea is also happy, while Arnold’s is “melancholy.”
This is wonderful. I especially love the final image, and its particular movement.