To The Shore

[changeling67]

Under the cut is the first piece of work that I wrote for my course.  As I do not have to use it, I will record it here and it is under the cut if you wish to read it, alongside is Duran Duran's To The Shore.



Write about a place of your choice (prose or poetry)

Distant curlews called across the mudflats, gulls bickered on the shoreline. Watery light seeped watery light from banked clouds and the crows in the meshed evergreens greeted me with loud cawing. I entered the old railway station where I stopped; waited for the train to rattle by and then crossed the line to the salty marsh of the beach.  The bird watchers trudged ahead of me: long-angled lenses watched swans awkwardly land, with curved wings dipped in the water.

I too, had only my camera for company, I often walk here to clear my head. My pathway was made of muddied shale and broken slate; of empty, sun-whitened limpets and blanched crab shells. The old boats sought haven against the wharf, the slack nylon ropes wrapped in plankton and plastic bags from past high tides. The previous night's storm strewed exotic flotsam of paint thinner cans, old netting and lighters, interspersed with straw and old, cracked seaweed. A graveyard of maritime waste gently eased into mud.

The oldest boat wreck had been there for a couple of decades, the owners long since gone; steadfast as solid rock, tempered and shaped by the harsh Atlantic weather. My touchstone.The vast timber rib cages of the hull arched out of the sand, like a sea monster -  beached and broken.  Its presence comforted me over time; it is near where I walked with my sister, discussing boys or her university plans. Walks with lovers and others, strolling over the sands.  Later, my children played pirate games on the boat - forging friendships and petty tyrannies, creating ghost stories and patterns with warm bubbled seaweed.  Pushed copper pennies still embedded in the softer wood underbelly.

I adjusted the aperture on my camera and different images swam into view.  Eroded by an unforgiving environment, the boat had grown in character.  Swollen blooms of rust changed contours of nails; the screws bled into the bare wood; the planking splits ending with warped knotholes; yellow algae and barnacles encrusted the hull.  On closer inspection, the boat had metamorphosed from machinery to a many-faceted animal.  I focused the lens on engine bulkhead, the pistons of an industrial dragon, now melded into metal fishes, making rust  flowers of oxidized bolts.  The flywheel had a turtle's head and a mask of an elephant peered through the slats. I photographed rivets that peppered the bow with long, terracotta streaks and eye sockets recesses that wept seaweed tears.

Water oozed through the mud, signifying a tide change.  I left the boat and walked onward to the quay, where the shell of the old dynamite shed honed into view. The estuary winds have peeled the old galvanized sheeting decades ago, some of it still lay as giant, curled leaves on the concrete floor.  The rusty roof trusses angled against the marbled clouds and the torn wire fencing flapped in the tailwind.  I pushed past the concrete post and pulled back the ancient netting. I took shots of the first shoots of buddleia that was sprouting from an old bunker, the dried thistles that grew through the lattice and the marsh grass that emerged from the black water.  Yellow ivy had taken over the russet metal columns and glassy sunlight made stark shadows on the ground. Back in time, it was a black warehouse where forbidden fruit was founded.  Hot salted breath and teenage rebel kicks. A cataloged pathetic fallacy, overlapped snapshots with memories; time meted out by the slipstream tide.

I stepped back onto the quay and looked onto the sea. Small children with red kites played on the waters edge.  I watched the cross currents pull at the incoming waves and was content with nothing else, but the white sand and the sea.