Erosion

Fidgeting beneath dank veils of fog
the half-term day trip begins by ferry.
Posterity clamours, yet I only half attend;
and unsure where to look, ahead or back,
dredge memory's reach for bearing.
No guide but our gentle wake of crossing.

Bedaubed with gaudy dinosaurs
a veteran tube train waits at the pier head:
reduced in circumstance, two coaches on single track.
Taken for a ramshackle ride,
we're rattled along to the end of the line;
to where, as stripling, I grew in sunshine.

There, with two good ears between them,
my parents shoulder their years with modesty:
arthritic lives perched safely clear of landslide.
Closer to the rust railed edge, newly exposed roots
gape at passing generations.
Each set of feet makes its own migrations.

Candlemass Bells bloom in nodding clumps,
their snow-white tears a mark of human hand;
likewise the cliff top shelter some hooligan transmutes
with fag butts, spray paint and rancid piss.
Via headlong hairpins then our path descends
to spill us, like outfall, on rippled sands.

That wind-pitted face whose crows nest early
commands the groynes, steams in risen mid-day heat.
Kids beyond "KISMET", a peeling beach hut palace,
we near the steps to climb full circle:
"Falls can take place", points out the hoarding,
"at any time, and without warning."
© Mark Cassidy

Commentary:

Like much of my poetry, this springs principally from observation: what I see becoming symbolic coat hooks, on which spiritual or metaphysical reflection can sometimes hang. In this case, the uncertainties and creeping fatalism of middle age lie below the surface.

It is a crowded time of life. One's perspectives are often determined by the immediate demands of those around you. Taking my children on a visit to their grandparents, and isolated by the fog, I began pondering the relative importance to me of embracing the future, as opposed to consolidating the past. Hence a 'death-somewhere-around-the-corner' tone imparted by the language - "posterity", "wake of crossing", "the end of the line", "passing generations", "full circle". The concluding couplet is a verbatim quote.

Our journey there, and subsequent walk, served as a means of exploring the significance of place to self-identity. ("Each set of feet makes its own migrations.") The cliff itself seemed to mirror the ever-changing and precarious nature of life.

The rhyme scheme came about initially by chance. Having closed each stanza with a rhyming (or near rhyming) couplet, I sought a linking rhyme (4th. line of one stanza with 3rd. of next) to give counterbalancing continuity. Similarly, I wrestled to keep each stanza to 60 syllables, in the interests of an even rhythm. The line about the coaches proved especially difficult to trim, but I wanted to retain "reduced in circumstance" as a vernacular phrase - not only because I remember the days of up to 7 on double track, but also to prefigure my parents situation.

"Candlemass Bells" is a name, gleaned from my mum, for snowdrops. It was a convenient way of indicating the time of year. As they are not a native British species, so they become "a mark of human hand". If "then" in this penultimate stanza seems oddly placed, it's where it is to suggest that beauty (the snowdrops) & ugliness (the shelter) are two directions between which we zigzag through life, as well as to indicate the temporal progress of the walk.

Spookily, about a fortnight after writing this, there was a large-scale cliff fall not far away along the main esplanade. "KISMET" (unless obliterated by further falls!) refers to a particularly shabby beach hut!

Mark Cassidy
Bonfire contributor