English Beach Poets Society News

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They are closing the piers...

They are closing the piers
pulling up stumps
clocking off
giving up

They are shutting down the pubs
calling permanent time
kicking us out
giving up

They are turning off the waves
switching off the sun
melting the stars
giving up

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold 1867

Rosemary Tonks - R.I.P.

Neil Astley's obituary of Rosemary Tonks.

Driftwood sketches (hand on heart)

Day dream

night scene

sun blinds

moonshine

dawn tide

faded light

sand in shoes

it’s old news

Coffee break

body shakes

cut grass

needn’t ask

black jam

long man

driftwood

it’s all good

From Beachy Head

to sofa bed

Long Reef

to good grief

the aftershocks

the lock stock

a red hand

sun tanned

Hawley sings

a child swings

Orion’s belt

the sky melts

spread light

like marmite

if it’s Earl Grey

it’s Tuesday

The lakes edge

sleepy head

red wine

not this time

a butterfly

flits by

a dolphin glides

the ocean wide

Painted beach

cold feet

golden mile

warm smile

hot shower

stolen hours

a sea mist

the last kiss

Cornish Cliffs

Those moments, tasted once and never done,
Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun.
A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun-

The seagulls plane and circle out of sight
Below this thirsty, thrift-encrusted height,
The veined sea-campion buds burst into white

And gorse turns tawny orange, seen beside
Pale drifts of primroses cascading wide
To where the slate falls sheer into the tide.

More than in gardened Surrey, nature spills
A wealth of heather, kidney-vetch and squills
Over these long-defended Cornish hills.

A gun-emplacement of the latest war
Looks older than the hill fort built before
Saxon or Norman headed for the shore.

And in the shadowless, unclouded glare
Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where
A misty sea-line meets the wash of air.

Nut-smell of gorse and honey-smell of ling
Waft out to sea the freshness of the spring
On sunny shallows, green and whispering.

The wideness which the lark-song gives the sky
Shrinks at the clang of sea-birds sailing by
Whose notes are tuned to days when seas are high.

From today's calm, the lane's enclosing green
Leads inland to a usual Cornish scene-
Slate cottages with sycamore between,

Small fields and tellymasts and wires and poles
With, as the everlasting ocean rolls,
Two chapels built for half a hundred souls. 

John Betjeman

She paints the sea red

The moon paints her lips red, opens the door and shines. Her jewels glisten on the curves of the water as her hips dance to rhythm of nature.

Poetry (in ocean)

Viking

North Utsire

South Utsire

Forties

Cromarty

Forth

Tyne

Dogger

Fisher

German Bight

Humber

Thames

Dover

Wight

Portland

Plymouth

Biscay

Trafalgar

FitzRoy

(Finisterre)

Sole

Lundy

Fastnet

Irish Sea

Shannon

Rockall

Malin

Hebrides

Bailey

Fair Isle

Faeroes

Southeast Iceland

Nightpoetry

Dress neck to sole

brogue laced

and swiftstride

alongside the saltsea battered

coastal defences

gulls mimic the ack-ack

attack-attack-attacka

from masts and the past

strobe flows across

the carpet gardens

from the balloon lined

dysfunction rooms

down to the flaked edges of oldtown

crunchleather stones are picked up

and flungtossed sidearm

into the bibberty-bobberty

light bulbs weave waves

along the length breadth

of the repeat repeat to the end

testing for a fault

resting at the fort

old words walk

along old walls

as the ritual of nightpoetry

rears up and up

like the foamsmash

at the pierjump

rushing through

my sand coated

cold iron fingers.

We know

You know

...I can’t make this walk home

without the call of your tide

flooding my heart once more...

A homesick lament

Walking on sunshine in the italian gardens, diplocks, students, the sun, mushrooms, the cry of the gulls, the sea in the moonlight, ziggys, sledging by the martello, the sea anytime, heptet, bang utot (Mike R.I.P), concerto of lovers, the spartan, chaterlands, the acceleration couch (Gary R.I.P), the foghorn, the sea... the sea .... the sea. How on Earth did I end up living in the fucking Midlands?

Chris Blaubac
http://blaubacphoto.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/down-to-the-sea/

He only wrote poems in the sand

A decade of cinders, charred and recoiling

like flames on ice, burning himself

into the silence of the tides

sat on the edge of the sea, cold, unambiguous

dressed head to toe in sympathetic shades

of a sickened summer

as the boys on drift boards, surf by on clouds

heading inland as the eddies and swirls

build steep turrets and walls

whilst the vast temporal cadences

offer themselves up to sly celestial forces

he writes poems in the sand

scratched in the stars

sprawled on the sand

the agonies and rusted anguish

of life burnt away, not so much snubbed

as whispered out, the petrified seaweed

clings to the salt-cloaked body

the huge canon of work, smeared from history

by the sweet rolling waves.

He has no other dreams at all

always on the beach detained and cleansed

like a prisoner on the block, forgetting his crime

like the poems that he wrote in the sand.

---

Andrew Franks

from Scratched in the stars, sprawled on the sand - 2009