9th July 2021
Sunshafts, lancing over
The slate battlements of Musselwick Mouth:
Their midsummer steepness
And that edge-of-cloud theatrical intensity
Transform the salt smoke
Blowing off the tide’s turn swell
– Usually ghostly and so fugitive –
Into crisping fog-dense billows of locomotive breath…
As if some impossible Irish express
Had just pounded out of the Atlantic,
Hauled up-cliff showering starfish sparks,
And thundered Paddington-bound
Off across the barley fields.
© Christopher Jessop 2021
