Beach

Fierce:
rocks, black and smoothed.
A sculptor-God made this Atlantic beach.
Random, unexpected shapes in granite.
Some millennial visitor has liveried one
in ocean-liner red and black; Titanic whited
on the prow of this shiprock.

Shapes:
here a dolphin,
there an abstract of solid drama.
Their forms burst out of parched grass,
cold eruptions from the earth’s guts.
There, in front, the sharp, coarse sand
like shattered pieces of the glass it could become.

Past:
a smugglers’ beach?
Or the hopeful despatch of a bottled message
from sailors ill-met by those self-same rocks
guarding the interior from the sea
and all who fail on her savage spume?
Or nothing? Not even a fisherman’s cove?