Here at Tramore, the land is winning;
its seaward march staked out in marram
—leathery frontiersman; original settler—
and in its wake, in its dune-backed redoubts,
coastal deposition’s infill. Ten years
from rust-stained strand, salt- and fly-caked,
to the duns, olives and ochres of marsh
stippled and stiffened with magenta orchids;
reed beds glinting with damsels and darters;
the emerald grasses of water meadow.
Only ten years from algae to sedge
to the etched petals of Grass of Parnassus.
Beyond, the no-man’s land of desiccation
spiked with wrack and broken shell
and further still, a tide line of the displaced
—writhing goose barnacles, gasping
for anchorage; bezelled jellyfish—
where only burrowers and the emancipated
(sand-hoppers and sea-slaters) survive.
At the strand’s end, black basalt rears
from its intertidal tweed of shells
to thrift, sedum, and a raven’s nest; its ledge
bar-coded with birdshit. And now this
ling-sprung headland (Look at the view!) where larks
—like flautists scaling each other’s arpeggios—
suddenly cede to the single-noted rock pipit.
Copyright: Jean Bleakney
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| Judith Boyd (QUB Architecture Student) |
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