The Groundswell

With heavy doleful clamour, hour on hour, and day on day, The muddy groundswell lifts and breaks and falls and slides away.

The cold and naked wind runs shivering over the sands, Salt are its eyes, open its mouth, its brow wet, blue its hands.

It finds naught but a starving gull whose wings trail at its side, And the dull battered wreckage, grey jetsam of the tide.

The lifeless chilly slaty sky with no blue hope is lit, A rusty waddling steamer plants a smudge of smoke on it.

Stupidly stand the factory chimneys staring over all, The grey grows ever denser, and soon the night will fall:

The wind runs sobbing over the beach and touches with its hands Straw, chaff, old bottles, broken crates, the litter of the sands.

Sometimes the bloated carcase of a dog or fish is found, Sometimes the rumpled feathers of a sea-gull shot or drowned.

Last year it was an unknown man who came up from the sea, There is his grave hard by the dunes under a stunted tree.

With heavy doleful clamour, hour on hour, and day on day, The muddy groundswell lifts and breaks and falls and slides away.