Meandering along Grange Prom

Alison, Annette, Jeni, Julia, Rose, Sanjive 

We wandered the prom and Rose joined us for a cuppa afterwards. It was a grey mizzly day at first, with no sight of the other side of the bay beyond Arnside.

We introduced ourselves to each other and spoke of food growing, defining the local, peninsula boundaries, spice trading, tongue taste receptors and of mycelial creations made to spark thought and conversation. 

As we wandered conversation turned to the lack of edibles along the promenade gardens (or was it lack of knowledge), dreams of chalk labelling on the pavement to identify edibles and men in top hats. The exercise machines enticed us to be playful and we peered through the lido barriers to talk of projects and funding, money and aspirations.

Our beady eyes spotted snowdrops and cyclamen amidst the deep damp brownness of the plantings, We shared poems of the sea:

Haiku, by Annette

Blue green sea flowers

Yellow red dead roses drift swell

Furrows blight black sea 

Pouf, by RS Thomas

It was March.

A wind. 

Blew. Sudden flowers

Opened in the seas 

Garden; a white bird

Stooped to them. From the town

at the sea's edge

Voices,

Frightening the bird,

Smirching the flowers.

The town

Was a thousand years old,

But the sea

Had refused to live with it.

Sea to the West, by Norman Nicholson

When the sea’s to the west

The evenings are one dazzle –

You can find no sign of water.

Sun upflows the horizon;

Waves of shine

Heave, crest, fracture,

Explode on the shore;

The wide day burns.

In the incandescent mantle of the air.

Once, fifteen,

I would lean on handlebars,

Staring into the flare,

Blinded by looking,

Letting the gutterings and sykes of light

Flood into my skull.

Then, on the stroke of bedtime,

I’d turn to the town,

Cycle past purpling dykes

To a brown drizzle

Where black-scum shadows

Stagnated between backyard walls.

I pulled the warm dark over my head

Like an eiderdown.

Yet in that final stare when I

(Five times, perhaps, fifteen)

Creak protesting away –

The sea to the west,

The land darkening –

Let my eyes at the last be blinded

Not by the dark

But by the dazzle.

Song Of The Sea, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Timeless sea breezes,

sea-wind of the night:

you come for no one;

if someone should wake,

he must be prepared

how to survive you.

Timeless sea breezes,

that for aeons have

blown ancient rocks,

you are purest space

coming from afar…

Oh, how a fruit-bearing

fig tree feels your coming

high up in the moonlight.

I must go down to the sea again, by Spike Milligan

I must go down to the sea again,

to the lonely sea and the sky;

I left my shoes and socks there -

I wonder if they're dry?