Nor East Coast 2020 Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Caravans front the sea like gritted teeth
Steeling for the storms that winter brings
Incongruously named
Sahara, Rio, Granada, Burgandy

The caravans are ringed by gorse, rosehips and fuschia
Pebbles instead of lawns, with bonsai plants

Tom Thumbs like torn butterflies
Flap in the bitter breeze

In the sea, kelp belly flops
The colour of khaki
Like army webbing steeped ten days in mud

Waves unroll like bandages
Jellyfish sprawl in their wake
Wobbily and stranded
Like scooped out brains

The sea veins run like marble
Breakers are shattering glaciers
White as Himalayan peaks

Rocks, pitch back when wet
Barnacle grey when dry

An exotic clump of alfafa
Massing waves mauraud the shuddering beach
Like norse invaders
Sea winds have bleached and peeled a wooden fence

In the roar and chop of the tide
Terns wing-surf the wind
Shards of coral loll in the waves' hammock

A hermit crab pokes tentative pincers out
Dogs pee in the childrens'park
Strain on extended leashes
Swings creak under toddlers'puppy fat

The sandpit launches many fantasies
A rescue helicopter putters overhead
Perhaps to rescue a climber from the cliff

Or hoist aloft the lost from sinking dinghy
Caught in a rip tide amateur jack tars

The sea is the quern that grinds the rocks
To pebbles the shells to sand

On its spar of out-flung rocks
Like a crocodile back,
A gull's on the lookout for fish

This year the Costa Brava's off the menu
No toasting British buttocks to a turn
On Rhodes or Crete or sunny Barcelena

Like bladderwrack, seaweed,
All of us at the whim of the tide

And through it all, children come whooping and laughing
With fire in their heels
Little red dragons, embracing the world's wonders