Gwynver, Twilight
by Matt Smith
A day of toil in bright glare, warm wind on salt-stiffened skin;
And as you dug that sand, tossed across taut shoulders
The sea clawed its way towards you,
Announcing its intentions with each slapping encroachment.
Castle: well no- more a folly:
A vast sprawling thing of towers and turrets, pinnacles and finials;
Great arms of battlements; lavish palisades and colonnades;
A chapel with gargoyled walls, and there if you blinked, a great fluked tail.
You could go on building forever -
Great arcs of impacted sand stretching across the beach -
But by now there is a broiling urgency.
A race, a race against the moon’s insistent tug.
Last parapets are shaped,
Neat slitted windows for bowmen carved out.
Flat roofs are smoothed, eaves hollowed by nimble fingers;
And the moats’ steep sheer sides shored with driftwood.
A few short steps: a bucket, face first into the sea,
Is filled and emptied into the moat.
There the water bubbles and foams, sinks into the gasping sand
You step toward another but the sea is insistent, just there, just there.
The inevitable sea comes- lapping at your feet, pulling at you.
It pours into the moat: first a dribble, a trickle
Then a foaming, joyous gushing
The space of the trench filled with weight upon weight of water.
As levels rise, so the outer wall is breached.
Sand crumbles and driftwood plundered, floats on the surf;
Maw doorways choke on invading lather,
Towers begin their languid subsidence…
With the water at your knees you slowly back away
And in the gathering gloom, you stand and watch:
Your stalwart opulent folly all gravity and power
Now a hovering island
As the last turret vanishes, the gimlet eye collapsing in on itself,
There is a wild commotion beneath the surface
As if a great force were gathering itself: you hear a muffled liquid roar
And that great tail appears above the waves, thrashes once and is gone.
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:16 pm
This is quite good. Not normally one for poems, I found this pleasant. I wonder whether the writer would usually write poems?
October 29th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
This is such a great adventure. So wonderfully filled with description, it takes you there, without having to see it.
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