Please visit Paul Brookes’ blog to read the poems and see the artworks that inspired them.

After the rain

They sailed out with a sky, fierce dark and red raging,
on a sea thick as oil and the black swell rising,
while we waited and watched, as winds lashed, and oceans
poured monsters of whale-waves over the cliffs.

Though we peered through the spray and the kelp-spume flying,
the night was as black as a Good Friday Mass,
and as red as a planet lost out of its orbit,
blood red as a moon with disaster to sow.

The morning came quiet, wind sifting the high dunes,
sifting the sand where we waited in vain,
sifting the debris splintered and broken,
scattering what we had before the black rain.