Day Eight: Beachcombing

-All photos by Annest Gwilym

Whelk Shell

Shells hold secrets
folded in the whorls,
where the creature hid.

The open mouth
sings like the tide,
or the vastness of space,
the emptiness between stars.

As a child they looked like
ice cream cones
or fairytale turrets.

Older, like bones
scattered on the beach,
bleached and crumbling
slowly into sand.

Held to the ear I hear
the rushing blood and heartbeat
of a living being.

© Annest Gwilym

BEACHCOMBING 

The sea will tell a tale if you place an ear to a shell.
Her tidal treasures softly wash, gift-wrapped in weed.
I think the tale will be Lord of the Flies;
it shall end in Deliverance.

A celtic knot scratched in the sand. Art.
Washed away at the end of the day.
That this is all ephemera –
is what the artist is trying to say.

Fire,
tinder and a spark juxtaposed,
The fire always burns,
it’s supposed.

Often it doesn’t – the spark fails to catch or tinder burns away,
small twigs exhaust before larger ones ignite,
It’s too damp; too windy,
cold hands tremble with malnutrition ;
or fear.

But when it catches and flares,
twigs crackle, logs smoulder,
a rose like a sunset blooms;
the feeling is incredible.

Being primal in the wilderness,
sharpening a skewer-stake.
Everything we need must found
or we’ll have to make.

I am the first on Newmania.
Walking a pacific island’s deserted shore,
collecting coconut husks, smooth glass,
sun-dried bits of crate.

Survival has four pillars. Shelter. Fire. Water. Food.
A fifth now – threat.
The other contestants arrive by speedboat soon;
Wannabe pop star, internet influencer, boob-job, ex-footballer.

It’s not a reality show,
we’ve been kidnapped by evil people :
‘The one who survives the Island,

-John Wolf 31st July 2021.

-All photos by Sarah Louise Wheeler

The Marine Sonnets:

Beachcomber

Gale force Eight or more with an Easterly
throws things on my shores, material drifts
on my strongest waves and currents, firmly
North to South. Comb me as my gales desist

start to subside or veer West. See patches
of weed and black coal amongst my rocks.
Delve into huge feet thick seaweed masses
Find rare ,warm Baltic amber in same spots

as coal and Whitby jet. Prove real amber
sandpaper it and smell Pine tree resin.
My fossils, bullet shaped Belemnites are
with curled Ammonites released from within.

Don’t get caught by my rising tide, falling
cliffs. Every find, a story calling.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

Recognizing the relevance and importance of friendship as a noble and
valuable sentiment in the lives of human beings around the world,

Bearing in mind that friendship between peoples, countries, cultures and
individuals can inspire peace efforts and presents an opportunity to build bridges
between communities, honouring cultural diversity,

Affirming that friendship can contribute to the efforts of the international
community, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, towards the
promotion of dialogue among civilizations, solidarity, mutual understanding and
reconciliation,

Convinced of the importance of involving youth and future leaders in
community activities aimed at the inclusion of and respect between different
cultures, while promoting international understanding, respect for diversity.

Extract from UN.

Not That Kind of Love Poem
(for Emily)

Something there is that loves
coffee and a lake and the smell
of old books and the quiet
tides of conversation.
Your delicacy with a hint
of steel, your alert ears,
your gentle passion.
Talking with you,
everything’s discovery,
like reinventing the world.

-Gregory Luce

Bios and Links

-Gregory Luce

is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications), Tile (Finishing Line) and Riffs & Improvisations (forthcoming from Kelsay Press). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing), and Unrequited and Candlesticks and Daggers (ed. Kelly Ann Jacobson). In 2014 he was awarded the Larry Neal Award for adult poetry by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Retired from the National Geographic Society, he lives in Arlington, VA, and works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC. He blogs at https://dctexpoet.wordpress.com.

 

Day Seven – What marine life does for us.

-photo by Paul Brookes

from Five Ways to a Secret

V. Sea

The sea comes in on the breath of the wind,
touching my face, finding my tears.
After oceans of grief, bitterness, years
of drought, of course it is the sea that finds
the well-spring of my words and fills it with water.
Your voice is the wind, cool on my skin.
I bite my lip, I drink you in,
tasting of blood: copper and salt.

You are all through everything, sweet in my mouth,
deep in my veins the tide flowing,
drowning in the memory of another life.
I fill my lungs with the sea and shout.
Beating with the pulse of the moon-wrenched ocean,
my heart is as wide as the sky.

©YMarjot2021

Ultramarine

The other day lobsters swam
inside through the kaput panes.

Our daughter is born with the gills.
We wear something forged and feigned.

For one jiffy fear had a mouse-run
in our minds’ maze, but then they circled past.

Two songs we glug – Yellow Submarine
and Imagine – never leave from our dreams.

Tonight I and my daughter sit
atop one broken mast. Stars, some dead

but still twinkling, pronounce Black aloud,
with thick accents, and all the shades we know

shed their hues. Perhaps meanings too,
have no meaning anymore. We live our deaths

fine and our this marine life. We whisper, we
close our eyes. Wishes decree a star’s fall.

-Kushal Poddar

The Marine Sonnets:

Therapy

Listen, soft crash of my waves alter your
brain patterns, feel my sand exfoliate,
your skin as my unevenness makes floor
walk harder, works your calves and thighs. A state

of meditation lulls, slows your heart beat,
deepens your breath. My blue sky and sun shoot
up your body feel good drugs, my heat
and negative ions ensure reboot.

I massage the vagus nerve in your neck,
enough for all this to happen. Watch fish
in rockpools provide aquariums check
your stress, rejuvenate a hug and kiss.

I’m health resort, recommunion,
refresher, renewer, good reunion.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Yvonne Marjot

is a lost kiwi, now living on a Scottish island. She has been making up stories and poems for as long as she can remember. Her first volume of poetry, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet, won the Brit Writers Award for poetry in 2012. She loves her job, running a small public library, and has published four novels and a book of short stories. Twitter handle: @alayanabeth

Sixth Day – Fish-Life

 

Fish in the sea

they always look like
they want a kiss

           from a dry-land stranger
           when in truth, they are gasping their last

           with a barb shooting out
           of their aquatic tenderness
their eyes glued to your face

-Elizabeth Moura

 

-Pam Flitt and Ivor Folio

SALTWATER FISHLIFE 

You are the ocean and ocean is you.

One year of this life, as driftwood,
the world’s oceans I travelled.
The tide took me; the gulf lent a push.

My saga was enriched
with wisdom from nature’s oracles ;
spattered as it was, in so many places,
on ship’s hulls like barnacles.

On ice floes I laughed as we flipper-flapped
at a fish joke from a Seal,
In the Great Barrier Reef, I dodged
the snap of a Conger Eel.

A Puffer Fish made it known he had social spikes.
In open ocean floating free,
A Portuguese Man O War reminded me,
what those tentacles are for.

For a time, on a whale’s back I rode.
Soul-deep, the empathy of her eye,
There, I found, a kind of love that will never die.

From a Giant Turtle, a sad tale I heard;
he was the last one his kind.

Through Kelp forest, a see-through shoal
trumpeted my drift;
Horses no man can ride birthing foals
did the eye stroke and swish.

Until I gave myself to the ocean
a part of me always remained,
Separate, unconnected to the Dolphin within.
When I let go of fear, truth salted my skin.
Life became simple –
it’s just the ocean we’re in.

Salt is vital,
it’s the the stone-people’s gift.
The blood-iron bitter-grit
of survival.

For driftwood, flow is everything;
direction, chance, adventure.
Remember.

-John Wolf 29th July 2021

The Marine Sonnets

The Sturgeon

Bottom feeder. I live in two waters.
Sense their electric impulses vibrate,
suck into my mouth all their shells and claws.
Soon move from Deep to brackish water. Wait

until I am used to warmer Narrow,
release my sticky eggs. My babies swim
seaward. Get used to brackish in Shallow
before move into Deep, not over rim.

Above dredge our living, scarifying
life, haul us up into light and dryness.
Harvest our babies before their birthing.
Hunted my ancestors rich meatiness.

Deep returned I may leap, keep the reason
a mystery, splash my flat sides, frisson.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

–Pam Flitt and Ivor Folio

write and perform spoken word, comedy and song in and around the Kent & Sussex borders. They have occasionally roamed further afield on their “Posh Villages Tour”, which they initially embarked upon just prior to the first lockdown, and hope to pick up where they left off for as long as Boris and Covid-19 allow. They have graced the stages of many local festivals both as performers and as coordinators of “Voices” spoken word events, and appear regularly on BBC local Radio. In recent months they have been working flat-out with a small committee of like-minded poets from The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society to organise and deliver The Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival (15-27 August).

-Annest Gwilym

‘Author of two books of poetry: Surfacing (2018) and What the Owl Taught Me (2020), both published by Lapwing Poetry. Annest has been published in many literary journals and anthologies, both online and in print, and placed in several writing competitions, winning one. She is a nominee for Best of the Net 2021.’

-Steve Ely’s

poetry publications include Oswald’s Book of Hours (Smokestack, 2013), Englaland (Smokestack, 2015), Incendium Amoris (Smokestack, 2017), Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God (The High Window Press, 2018), Jubilate Messi (Shearsman, 2018), Zi-Zi Taah Taah Taah (Wild West Press, 2018) and Lectio Violant (Shearsman, 2021). He has also published a novel, Ratmen (Blackheath Books, 2012), and a biographical work, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield.

-Elizabeth Moura

lives in an old factory and works with elders. She has had poetry or flash fiction inHuman/Kind Journal, Rose Quartz Poetry Magazine, Hawk & Whippoorwill, The Cormorant, Radical: A Lit Zine,  Chrysanthemum, Occulum, Flash, Paragraph Planet, and Flash Fiction Magazine. On Twitter @mourapoet, Instagram mourathepoet. 

Fifth Day – Sand Dunes And Saltmarshes

-Sand Dune artwork by Yvonne Marjot

Watching at Spurn Point

Saltwort, sea-spurge, marram grass root in sand
scaffolds for the dunes that grow with the tides.
Softwood breakwaters branch to the headland
where black-headed gulls take wind driven rides.

Shrill calling terns flock glorious in flight
until they drop, dive the ebb, dive the flood.
At the tide line blossoms of black and white
oystercatchers probing estuarine mud.

Migrating birds don’t mimic clouds by choice
as their journeys cross shadowing the sun.
All the raucous cries sounding like the voice
of the wind, waves and sand never outrun.

Saltwort, sea-spurge, marram grass root in sand
scaffolds for the dunes that grow with the tides.
Softwood breakwaters branch to the headland
where black-headed gulls take wind driven rides.

Shrill calling terns flock glorious in flight
until they drop, dive the ebb, dive the flood.
At the tide line blossoms of black and white
oystercatchers probing estuarine mud.

Migrating birds don’t mimic clouds by choice
as their journeys cross shadowing the sun.
All the raucous cries sounding like the voice
of the wind, waves and sand never outrun.

-Julia Corbett

Skylark

Who would have guessed
its insignificance,
that here on the path
it could be a sparrow
only skinnier?

Then it rises
with that distinctive flight
like the way I cycle
hell for leather
then a glorious freewheeling

-Carole Bromley

SAND DUNES & SALTMARSHES 
Romney Marsh 1066

Englalond greets us with the smell of eggy fart;
salt marshes reek of death.
This is our gift to Harold;
we expect a crown in return.

The marram grass clings in tufts
like wild, lime-haired Picts,
having hurled themselves over Hadrian’s wall;
who cannot now occupy the land for long.

The striped square sail grinds into soft sand
not on a broad bay as planned.
Already the midges are out in opposition,
but no shield-bearing Saxons.

There is no Matilda in sight –
fine new flagship bought by Duke William’s wife.
Other than a hooded figure boiling crabs
there are no signs of human habitation.

Our fleet-footed scout catches this serf
while the rest of us wobble on sea-legs.
Turns out we’re in Romney,
a good thirty miles east of the invasion fleet.

This whole affair is ill-fated –
Storms in the Seine estuary
nearly sunk us before we set off.

Great sand dunes slip and slide,
under hoof and underfoot,
of sweaty retainers in iron-ringed hauberks
grumbling about lack of water.

William intends
to establish a beach head
fortify the coast against counter-attack.

We risk his wrath arriving late for a battle,
need to know the lie of the land.
The man chained to our mast was born in Mercia,
tells me we are in Cent.

The slave raises his head and laughs.
Dozens of boats are in the water,
men swarming with spears and bows.
Too many; we must away.

-John Wolf 28th July 2021.

-Leela Soma

Blooming

A celandine went first,
and if we had ever looked, we would have known
it was a freeze-frame of a live firework,
we would have expected
the violence that sparked from the inside out,
the heat petalling sweetly,
each stamen springing a hellmouth.

A rose caught,
thorns spitting pop-pop-pop from the stem,
the leaves crisping, and as an afterthought,
the buds, like charged kisses,
lipped the flames to ragwort and vetch.
An oxeye daisy burst,
white-hot in its eagerness.

We dialled nine-nine-nine,
we called the press, but our words burned away,
and as day bloomed into evening time,
the honeysuckle, its lashes
glowing in the last light of the sun,
tipped a long wink to Venus
and blew like an H-bomb.

-Nina Parmenter

The Marine Sonnets:

The Sand Dune

A youngster I am blown about, scatter.
Roots arrive, dig into me, I grow here, hid
behind something from elsewhere, what matters.
Marram grass. Youngsters make a seaward bid,

sheltering me. I am background. My lime
rich shell sand, home to burrowing bees, quick
digger Wasps, sand swimming sand snakes.
In time
I grow older, taller, more chaotic.

Soon I may have a lake and marsh grass,
Later Sea buckthorn, birch. I am woodland.
My oaks rise, sunlight blooms through leaves, wings pass
in between branches. My youth blown sand.

I was near a sea but now I’m forest.
I hear my trees converse. Life never rests.

Bios And Links

-Julie Corbett

lives in Holderness and sometimes writes a poem. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and journals, including Spokes, Magma, The Fib Review, and The Right Eyed Deer.

-Carole Bromley

is a York-based poet writing for both adults (latest collection, The Peregrine Falcons of York Minster, Valley Press, 2020) and children ( Blast Off! Smith Doorstop, 2017)