Fading Beach Snapshot

Fading Beach Snapshot

‘He saw very clearly how all his life had led only to this moment…He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe it would ever leave.’

                                (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses)

Beyond attrition, she defies my gaze

This blonde dream-haunter, seen all sleek and new,

Smiling, uncomprehending, at a crab

That threatens her with keen, heraldic claws,

Whole crouching urchins dig with seaside spades.

Full breasts, unhaltered, swell her New Look blouse;

Slim legs raised high, sunning her candid thighs,

This dazzling rider jumps my memory

Across that sultry, summer afternoon.

Approaching thunder! I was digging too,

Crouched in the rain beside a treacherous shore,

Cursing  the mortars that had found our range,

My sodden battledress alive with ants,

Helmet bedecked with leaves – the martial look.

She wrote her Dear John on a Sussex beach,

Graceful and violent as a playful cat

Unsheathing claws from silk with lethal ease.

Her lover’s fatal shot struck my head and heart.

This cardboard sea murmurs no requiem

For queens of hearts – now trumped by graveyard spades –

Once blinded by this faithless, summer light.

Destiny overwhelmed her like a storm;

Surer than shellfire, clinging as napalm,

A crueller Crab was waiting down the years

To feed upon her breast, gnaw through her spine.

Smiling, she writes, ruthless, uncomprehending,

Pencilling the letter mouldering in my mind.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM