The speaker is a parent mourning a dead son, and the poem moves between a white cliff landscape and a place of loss. The opening images of weed, chalk and pine feel unstable: whiteness looks solid but "could crumble." The speaker says they would risk the cliffs down to the sea, which suggests a desperate pull toward the water, or toward the son.
Midway, the poem turns to the body. Eyes, tongue and lips meet the chalk, but "no kiss that touch" suggests a contact that is cold and cannot replace a real kiss. Then the speaker states "i have come from algier," and the son is "dead in white cunt sand" at a place "where boats stop." The poem seems to connect Algiers and Marseille through the sea crossing, though it never spells out the circumstances of the death. The ending is the most striking moment: the speaker imagines the white dust screaming and says they can smell the scream in Marseille. The mood is raw, fragmented and haunted. The lack of punctuation makes grief feel unstoppable.