The territory has been widened by an hour
but this crowd kettled, though the dry grey stones
have spread from part way across the southern beach
to Agnes as fine arrowheads, touching
the black seaweed at the northern Gugh side, points
shattered into four gigantic splinterings.
Two days these rounds have been left here by gangs
of uncoordinated ocean with the law
of megalithic nature in their fumbling grasp.
Passive as all things are that cannot fall
or roll any further. They do not wait;
their mass collects, together and divisible,
pushed there by something less and more than chance.
Half way here, a stake of rocks hurtling south
from out black brown growth in Perconger shallows.
It is mismatched, unbalanced, perturbing.
It gets nowhere, a hobbled phalanx
taking on weak metaphors
if one is daft enough to think them up.
Like chasing a goat up a valley without science.
Nothing comes of it.
And, between the two,
rope tangles or a bird’s foot broken
pieces of something now unrecognisable:
a tiny gathering of skull-size boulders
with no discernible pattern to them.
The Cove swamps with its usual noise. A wind
is being built into manufacturies
of outrage and pushy-seeming nastiness,
while north the tide slips upwards over wrack,
silently almost; gentle almost; softly
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UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
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