The Late Boys

The scuttle bug clatters about the room,

Banging into coal carts and rag and bone men,

It scratches at summer cricket in back lanes,

And herds the late boys out of the long nights.

It runs the whole length of the pier;

Squeezed stone from the ocean's flow,

And kicks a block from the priory wall,

Until history called time for home.


The late boys raid the corner shop,

Drop the walls, refund the bottles back,

Spend the money on sickly tat,

Then down to the beach to throw rocks at crabs.

Along the shore you will find them all,

Hidden in the world war concrete,

The smelly rags of lonely men,

The tide takes out to rot down again.


This bug that scuttles about the skull,

Chases out his tidehood memories,

The trawler that broke from its weary tow,

Its settled hull was swarmed like pirates,

Life vests, maps and the most prized compass,

We stripped it down to its ship's bare bones,

Looting it like we had always known,

The untrained orphans of an island home.

Charley’s Garden

When his part in the garden started Charley cupped handfuls of fine ice-scraped loam and let the tilth run from his fingers into the sea,

Caught by the sharp wisht of a northern wind, laying down a rich dark rind in lands he could not imagine,

His father told him not to play with the soil. It was a waste, the mineral chain of their family bone, though each year it took one step less to reach the last row of lettuce,

The sea knows nothing of the claims of men, seeking to shape all land as its own.

Something among the strata of Charley’s family, the suck and rage of tide and wave, the ancient way ice loaded the land, made the garden harder.

Work hammered iron, this land was white hot and turned the sea to steam around it. This rock would not make easy sand.

The sea knows how to wait. It can take time outside and grind it to understand. Divide around the prow, weep away at the softer cracks, mine the ground.

One night half the moon explodes, giant sea foam flowers grow, fallen architecture of the ancient mason.

Each day in his eighties Charley took the precipitous walk to his vegetable patch. Straining like a wind blown craft his arch collapsed.

The last stack, land leans towards the East, tipping time tended to the rising sun. A final bow before the level venture of the waves.