A poem written during my days living on the coast of England in North Devon.
Little green trumpets multiply,
stitching up the cracks
of this Edwardian wall.
Its lopsided pasty stones
huddle together like penguins
as winter begins to whisper its name.
Their compression divides air from air,
where sprinting sea currents laugh
at us and our silly efficiency.
We hurry going nowhere while
they perform a silent opera, mocking
the word we worship – ‘busyness’.
Colors change like a thick layer
of freckles on the lawn while we walk by
chatting about something like nuclear weapons.
We want to be heard, us and
our extreme words, and out there
the sea shifts mood, unraveling like masking tape.
But don’t call us extremists – we’re just
patriots living on English bluffs, these
dinosaur paws pressing into the sea.
We might not notice the clouds tuck
into each other, pink coats highlighting
in a display, an affair, all for us.
But the climax is over – now
they scrunch up with tears,
dripping a warning on us that we ignore.
