SANDSEND: A NEW POEM FOR NORTH YORKSHIRE...

Sandsend: Hauling Away…

(from Caroline Walker’s painting of the North East coast at Sandsend)

Sandsend's two pallid becks 

Slip into the ravenous ocean,

Which entices

With its devious devices

Of aqua, striped blue

And a gentle frothing of white,

In its display of false pretences:

And the ragged clumps of wood

Raise an intriguing, if fanciful notion…

The groyne posts protrude from compacted sand

Like shades,

As time itself fades,

Upon silhouetted hauling, heaving and the harnessing of contraband

Perhaps, from the North Sea’s wilder night-time shore…

The smuggling shapes still lean, hapless and awry

Like fractures,

Or weathered structures:

Once grim haulers, heavers and harnessers and their salvaging chore,

Fearful of the excisemen’s hue and cry… 

Pete Ray

31 May 2020

The posts looked like the memorial shadows of smugglers from Sandsend’s past, hauling in their contraband from a pleasant, if dubious North Sea…

Just an idea in my left-field mind…