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Dawn on the East Coast
by Alun Lewis
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From Orford Ness to Shingle Street
The grey
disturbance spreads
Washing the icy seas on Deben Head.
Cock pheasants scratch the frozen fields
Gulls lift
thin horny legs and step
Fastidiously among the rusted
mines.
The soldier leaning on the sandbagged wall
Hears in the comber's curling rush and crash
His single
self-centred monotonous wish;
And time is a froth of
such transparency
His drowning eyes see what they wish to
see;
A girl laying his table with a white cloth.
The light assails him from a flank.
Two carbons touching
in his brain
Crumple the cellophane lanterns of his
dream.
And then the day, grown feminine and kind,
Stoops with the gulfing motion of the tide
And pours his
ashes in a tiny urn.
From Orford Ness to Shingle
Street
The grey disturbance lifts its head
And one by
one, reluctantly,
The living come back slowly from the
dead.
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