It was the best of times*
the last of times
a seaside time we often took.
A late September get-away
an anniversary.
But looking back it was no carpe diem,
seizing the past instead,
replaying your life
as we do nearing death.
There the school playground, those chalk cliff shelters
further and further East from London's bombs
the beaches we walked so carefreely
over the mined and barbed memories
of a war-torn Wasteland
On Margate sands
the spectre of Eliot, broken, sheltering
connecting nothing with nothing.*
Yet each tap of your stick was joining the dots
tracing the pilgrim path, breathless
wearily trod to St Augustine's shrine
in Pugin's late Gothic masterpiece
I should have sensed it was an ending
two tired old English seaside towns
sitting sedately in shabby chic
one beach lift out of order
one lido closed
and the restless swallow swarms
circling overhead as we wheeled
and turned with them, hand in hand.
I had no premonition, missed the signs
the closeness of the hour when you would miss
our future.
- apologies to Dickens’ opening of “A Tale of Two Cities”
- Eliot visited Margate in 1921 suffering a nervous breakdown in which he wrote part of “The Wasteland’s” ‘Fire Sermon'”‘
- St Augustine landed very close to Ramsgate in AD 597,
For Dora’s Poetics challenge which is to conjure a view whether from travels or everyday life, desire or experience, that is coloured by the emotion of the moment to be recollected and/or cherished.
PoetryPix 