Dunwich Beach (re-write)

Wind rouses my hair on Dunwich

beach, a tangle rendered to a messy

thatch. Waves churn mud coloured

sand and current smoothed stones

torn from defenceless cliffs by winter

storms - one for every human on the

planet - sleep with plenty more for

Suffolk garden rockeries or repairing

flint walls of Norfolk cottages. Useful

nodules mingling with half-fossilised

shells. Bleached tree-stumps, sea-

stolen from coastal gardens carry

fragments of fourteenth-century

bricks back to the beach where

Norman stone from once important

buildings are slowly ground to sand

by North Sea tides and gravestones

are worn wordless by shifting gravel

on the sea-bed and on rare occasions

the bones those Dunwich burgers

once buried beneath them lay naked;

exposed under the frozen winter sun.