In the first part of my poetic "career," roughly 1973 to 1985 I was very much a city man and cannot recollect a single poem about or related to the sea except "Nightfall at Pagham Rife," written in 1978 and revised in May 2012 to remove much blather, (it was a time when I was greatly impressed by Ted Hughes. No longer!) Pagham is a small village to the west of Bognor Regis; the small streams and rivers about it are called "rifes." I posted the poem on 10 May 2012: it is linked here.
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There’s snow inland but on the coast just frost,
Though freezing’s freezing, birds know to their cost:
Pre-dawn there’s frost like paste a’gleam on walls,
Dead silence, not a gull nor cat that calls,
The moon’s pall shimmers, polishing the ice,
All’s paralysed and breath-held in a vice;
But then a blackbird through the silent stun
Risks half-heart fluting, faint and then it’s done,
And next a robin as if cracking sticks
Stut-stutters with its geiger counter ticks;
The gulls, though, wary, wait for light’s first hint
Which shims the rooftops in a blue-black glint,
And then they’ll quarrel, though with sotto-screams,
And launch and circle in the town-light gleams;
For fourteen hours they’ve crouched in ice-crust cold,
Their bellies void, whilst winds have hissed and tolled,
Now, starved, they wing like ghosts, beachward to feed,
Fighting for sandworms or wet shreds of weed.
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© January 2021
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There’s snow inland but on the coast just frost,
Though freezing’s freezing, birds know to their cost:
Pre-dawn there’s frost like paste a’gleam on walls,
Dead silence, not a gull nor cat that calls,
The moon’s pall shimmers, polishing the ice,
All’s paralysed and breath-held in a vice;
But then a blackbird through the silent stun
Risks half-heart fluting, faint and then it’s done,
And next a robin as if cracking sticks
Stut-stutters with its geiger counter ticks;
The gulls, though, wary, wait for light’s first hint
Which shims the rooftops in a blue-black glint,
And then they’ll quarrel, though with sotto-screams,
And launch and circle in the town-light gleams;
For fourteen hours they’ve crouched in ice-crust cold,
Their bellies void, whilst winds have hissed and tolled,
Now, starved, they wing like ghosts, beachward to feed,
Fighting for sandworms or wet shreds of weed.
===============
© January 2021
