This year’s National Poetry Day is today, Thursday 2 October.
The theme for 2014 is ‘remember’.
***
Memories of Jacob’s Room – At the Sea Lane Cafe
Beyond the pane of glass,
endless strata of sands stretch out to the lighthouse.
Wet swathes of brown and grey in irregular ridges,
in donkey colours.
I think of the rides of childhood he never had.
The sky sleeps snug above,
inverted greyness of the ground,
tucked in
and thickly cloud clad.
Stranded seaweed lies drying,
dying on the foreshore.
Patterns like magnified veins.
Scattered stones,
rounded down by years of wear,
worn down tossing in the waves.
Becoming sand.
Tossing in the waves.
The result of endless cycles of destruction,
construction,
worn down under pressure.
Tossing in the waves.
Becoming smaller,
and smaller.
Tiny damaged shells are picked up by playing children,
taken home, clamped tightly in their tiny hands.
Inside the adults sit, each at a table,
one a group of six absorbed in talk of the breakfast,
stolen from the office fridge.
Told by a man wearing tortoiseshell rims
around elegant eyes,
deep in experience,
face etched with laughter, he grins.
His white-grey hair merging with the wintry sky beyond,
beyond the glass.
I drift into daydream.
I would like to have known him.
‘Number fifty-nine. Pot of tea for two?’
‘That’s your peugot, the blue? Isn’t it? You’ve left your lights on.’
An older woman gets up, keys in hand.
Dragged from her steaming reverie,
thoughts abandoned.
Dragged back outside into the cold mainstream of life
by the saving, searching beams of her car.
She stays outside and walks along the ridge.
Kitesurfers catch the early morning offshore breeze
on their voyage out.
And I,
I think of Virginia Woolf
and her pebbles
and of knitting blue woolen stockings
which were so small.
And never worn.
***