Northern sea waters

Northern sea waters

The sea roils in lazy whirls.

Oily, dark and unctuous

Flattering to deceive

Too flat to be dangerous

Too solid, full of salt and seaweed

To be an attraction,

Even for sad-faced boys

Doe-eyed girls,

Wraiths in the half-light

Of memory.

Jumping from a pier

Into a trough of shadow

Never to be recovered

Young lovers

Runaway hearts

Banished as

Water Babies

Campfire stories

Older boys

Love to scare the daylights

Out of the young-uns

We were small-town bad,

Hunting rabbits with bow and arrow

The bows stripped from saplings.

We are all members of Greenpeace now

Environmentalists

Championing clean air

Curating the countryside

Keeping the greenbelt green

The brownfields brown

Slag heaps are

Postcard friendly

Remembering the old ways

As the sludge built up

In the space between high tide

And the storm drain

Where shoeless children once ran

In and out of the overflow

Imagining themselves as explorers

Marines in Burma

Winning a phoney war

Against innocence.

It is intolerance now.

Nobody knows how

To leave the past behind

It attaches itself,

Shackles the skinny ankles

Of the unworldly

Restricting the movement

Of the working underclass.

Modern living

Has never really caught on

In a post-industrial

Landscape.

It is an adjunct

A necessary adjustment

For the sake of appearances.

The pier is closed

During the winter

There is as much risk

On the sand

In a swell

Of shallow nights.

Dog walkers duck in and out

Of the dunes

Finding solace in

Canine companionship

Nobody remembers

The lost ones,

The ghosts in the water

The bones in the belly of a whale,

Other than the darkness

And the footprints

Left behind.