Hello Steve,
            There´s some nice description here but I find the whole poem a bit too overloaded. There´s so much happening, or being being described that I can´t take it all in. I feel, also, that some of your lines are overloaded. Line 2, for example, is quite a mouthful to read aloud.
 Maybe selection of fewer details and a bit less descritption might help to focus the reader´s  attention on the mood you want to evoke in the poem.
Hope this is helpful.


Best wishes,   Mike



--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---

AT NEWHAVEN

Breaking apart, layered cirrus hexagrams of cloud
Frosted pale blue sky's scroll with feathered wisps
Stirred by the down-beating wings of rising geese
From the frost-crisped marshes: our echoing steps
Resounded, hollow on deserted quays
Empty buildings "Sealink" "Customs", all locked:
We left the straggling town behind, its creek, the
Salt-streaked, laid-up, winter-rusted yachts.

A bare forest of masts, all sail-leaves shed,
neglected ropes, and sailcloth vaguely flapping,
The litter of flotsam, stranded by neap tides.
Only the fishermen, and Sunday cars, came near:
Someone had scrawled a giant name in sand
For the cold tide to lap at, and erase,
For the seagulls to decry, wheeling and keening,
While a flimsy aircraft trawled the mackerel sky,

Before turning, and droning, back to Shoreham.
Fire spluttered on the pebbles: shouting kids
Suddenly burning plastic, tins and driftwood, clanking anchors
Came muted to our ears down the still reach
of water, strangely dappled, pink and blue:
We clopped along the salt-sprayed, rime-glazed mole
Despite the cold, and stood beneath the lighthouse,
Thinking that Spring was somewhere over there

Far, South, across the glass-flat sea, past where
The fret merged with the massive white cliff-root
Beneath the blank flat face of Seaford Head
We watched the last ferry glide in from Dieppe
Beneath the crumbling cliff-fort's martial gaze
Massive, yet silent, unreal as any ghost
A Fliegende Hollander in prismatic light
Which tinted Seaford's endless bungalows

Ranked on the hill, the futile stacked martelloes
(Against that middle-class Napoleon,
Fear of retirement on a meagre pension)
In candied tiers of forsated, sparkling rose
Reflecting sad, last sunlight, shining on
Returning, bobbing, boats, stirring the long-
dead bones of wrecks, deep in their galleon-doom
Their sea-green-dungeon-age-encrusted hulks,

Their skeleton crews still manning rotten decks
Long for that glimmer still, pale feeble tint
That only we saw: it's more alive than they are
Swaying in the murky eddies
Beneath the fog, beneath the sandbanks where flotillas
Of fish flit darkly through their shivered hulks
and the great sand-eel probes dead orbits of their eyes

Yes, we were held there. The sun did not descend until we let it,
And home was far away, as Iceland, the North Pole, The Farthest Star
Now glimmering over the harbour,
While your face glowed gold in the dying beams and glowed
with that strange deep soft flame, of orient colours
As comes of driftwood burning on the fire
Which I cannot name, except to call it love.

Steve Rudd