28th June 2022
If only you’d abandoned
Your ever-attention-demanding screens,
And come this afternoon to watch from above
The large even swells breaking onto your nearest beach!
Contrast of colours, of stillness and motion:
Up here, devilcare edge-perching honeysuckle
Still glitters melba garish from the last pass of rain;
One hundred feet below,
Those ponderous inrumbles of oldbottle green.
First, the strengthening colour of steepening;
Next, that translucent peak of emerald-amber –
Tearing into ice white curltumbles,
So orchestral in this amphitheatre of a cove…
Aftermath, that crumpetbubble fractal pattern of fizzing air-rings,
Set all about with the dark tan blooms
Of spiral sand-stirs.
So even, the rhythm in this calm corner
Of the summer-painted bay –
Whose mileing paths are soup-tasty
With grass and bracken flavours,
Champagned all about with weddingdress cow parsley
And tutu pinksprinkled by cherryade late campion.
Through the heavy heat of after-rain
Age-bleached painted ladies and bedraggled dazzled moths
Air-totter amongst the still heavydroop seedheads,
While whitethroats seem to be trying
To sing their hedge homes dry;
But already the sunwashed barley is undulating whisperous again,
And we want to word its colour some blend
Of Spey-pale eastern Highlands malt
And parched savannah lionmane.
© Christopher Jessop 2022
