14_nowhere

NOWHERE

A place of chalk and barbed wire – where nails
are hammered far into wood.
Under low cloud even the sea looks white;

the listless cows crop the cliff-top grass. At the edge,
there’s a stained stone bath;
and by the track down to the unfenced shingle

a single traffic sign: NO ENTRY.
And why our journey
has brought us to this dead-end, who can say?

For the soul feels old here, encumbered
with the tonnage of millennia –
and the silence is the silence after a cataclysm,

final stroke, last syllable - unbroken by the thrum
of hot summer traffic, a wave
cracking on the shore, a lamb’s green bleat.

And high on a chalk plinth someone has put up a cross
with the bleeding corpse of Christ.
And someone has planted flowers at his feet.