Beach Cleaning
Our inefficient tides can't clean our beaches
as Public Services can, distinguishing between
what looks chic in a Tourism brochure and
what is destined soon for Bellozanne.
This is the brink,
where land meets sea -
a man-made problem clogs the sand,
cans and plastic, urban funk,
a dumping culture running out of dumps.
Left alone, the rhythm of the beach
will roll and sort and smooth and sift,
in a natural survival of what floats, what sinks.
The sea performs its nonchalant dance,
washing and soothing,
spits stone, lobs dead branches,
spumes and spindrifts,
belly flops shells, tosses out
gifts of fertilizer and food.
Fresh each tide, this waterfront gallery
of treasured junk, slubs of rope,
nuggets of milky sand-etched glass,
scrimshaw and ballast, cobbles of
pebbles and hand-painted pottery,
driftwood fretted and embossed,
sand runnelled and mollusc pocked;
viewings twice daily,
no appointment required.
After a storm, a supermarket trolley
is seaweed wreathed into a rusting frieze,
surreal comedian, stranded high
on the littoral zone.
Gunmetal, pewter, puce,
sea and sky shock motorists
racing to clock and watch.
Above the high tide mark seagulls
tap-dance a grass bank,
seducing worms with the soft deceit
of their rain dancing feet.
© Jacqueline Mézec
