Out here on the coast I can taste bountiful

pleasures from The Garden of England;

the juice of luscious fruit drips from my lips,

as rolling Downs determine distance between

far horizons and rolling sea.

 

The ‘Pearl of Kent’, lustrous still, with oyster

beds exposed at low tide; few boats remain

of a fishing trade capsized. 

And I look  to where people speak in a foreign tongue behind my back,

and tracks lead to voiced vacillation,

shops selling single cigarettes; and a line                                                                              

drawn by anyone who cares to stake a claim to

whatever birthright they think they own.

 

Along the shoreline the young gather in

groups startled by their own exuberance.

Summer, re-imagined in their world-view,

as they prepare to cast off from safe harbour,

career and college bound. Press-ganged

onto a ship of fools, as Old Blighty sets sail

for uncharted waters.

 

Further on around the bay, ‘ANOTHER TIME’

off Fulsam Rock; Gormley’s Iron Man, rusted

brown, faces outward to sea. Western sculpture,

movement being human, isolated, in front of

concrete and glass edifice, while the country

turns in on itself under a Turner sky;

easily imagined strapped to a mast against

gale force winds, as the sun sinks slowly in the west.

 

I prepare to travel inward; my mind fixed on returning north.

 

 

• Pearl Of Kent - Whitstable

   

• ANOTHER TIME  - Exhibition of sculpture concerned with movement within the flow of time

   

• Concrete and glass edifice – Turner contemporary museum Margate