Joseph Minden
Kent
Starting on Monday
and then Tuesday
we see nothing. A father
and son look up as we enter
their Hailsham shop.
Click.
A smile.
The pasty light
of a fishing lantern.
We take that for the van.
A mile or a half-mile
further on, we stop
to have our picnic
in the lee of a pylon
and in view of the cattle.
Past Battle,
the road is the flat of a golden
sword laid on Wealden
mud,
going down gently and
still more down.
The light
dulls at a roundabout,
a roundabout
at the edge of town:
Lydd.
Still nothing. No sand.
Dungeness. Out
there, we meet the estate
manager, Owen. Straight
away: the wives sunbathing,
the husbands fishing,
the children off,
bored,
flinging shingle
through windows like light.
Cars, brink-
parked, sink
into that same shingle
and I’m blamed. He pauses to cough.
I’m ignored.
And the mink…
Next day,
among the dawns of gorse made honey
by the sun, the first
clue. A cursed
mink confronts
us, while
from Dungeness B,
strokes light
against the sky,
a pylon strides by.
Perhaps this man’s a dad. We
can only assume. Once
he’s gone he is still there. While
my
efforts fail like young men
flung from rigging off Singapore, Owen
had finished,
fished
from the sea—or not—
and commemorated
in the cold
light
of regret, the desert flowers glow
unwitnessed. Well, blow
us down. An old,
grey gravestone shot
with rust at All Saints’ Lydd.
Some Joe
extinguished just like that
and a primrose burning splat
in the stone’s frame.
The name
Northfleet, too,
a Blackwall frigate
skewered by the Murillo,
Dungeness light
ablaze to no end,
too blind
to witness the still, slow,
frozen wave alive with clues
go down in a spate
of waves. Send
for help—there are
fathers and mothers spent here
uselessly. With the
corner
of our eye, we seize
the pylon dashing past—
giant pilgrim,
light
source. Canterbury.
The road the flats of gladii
laid in slim
succession down centuries.
We have breakfast
in sight of the heart of the see.
In the mote-lit air,
flags dissolve. Spare
time bleeds over caught
time, time caught
in graffiti’s counterscript:
PBIG 1603, I Goings 1749
WT 1768
and, in light
lines, Sean + Julie 2001.
Then,
as now, the long drape
of stone, the crypt
the shrine
of each self undertends,
the abstract
agedness of the texture of a flat
life. The cathedral’s
stalls
purpled, redded,
rendered golden by
the freefall
of light
through incomprehensible
stories, the miracle
of Thomas Becket and the initial
LEGO brick, Eustace reunited
with his family
in a brazen bull
and, before that, watching lions
kidnap his sons,
straddling two shores,
a pylon. Scores
of French kids flood
the Corona
but the martyrdom was corner-
born, out of the light,
where a body could be
riddled in its secrecy,
not openly destroyed before
God
as waterfalls of stone
and tall, blotchy
mouths of glass.
We see a shadow pass
behind the windows,
fast at first. It slows
to shade.
The sun
shines on,
points of light
catch the achievements
of the Black Prince,
golden
gauntlets and so on, remade
for the long run.
Moments
go by.
Suddenly,
a giant’s fistful
of shingle
bursts through the stained
panes, turning
a swathe of multicoloured
floorlight
white. In volcanic fury,
we upheave from our TV.
Dullard
children again,
spurning
their wretched family—
mum sunbathing,
dad fishing—
to excruciate
the good denizens of the estate.
But we only see, beyond
a sawtooth edge
of many-coloured glass,
a pylon in the light,
listing to port
like a Blackwall frigate,
spilling a glissando
of pebbles from its hand,
then hopping over the next hedge
to make good its get
away like a bad dad.
Sad.
What remains? Low, strange childrens
of lichen
shifting in the drift,
vacant tourists
drifting across shingle
in the special light,
the estate manager, Owen, fed
up—he states simply: sods—
and a single
grief, like a ship’s whistle
in watercolour, mist-
bloodied.
JOSEPH MINDEN is a poet and secondary school teacher. His book-length poem Backlogues was released by Broken Sleep Books in 2023. Paddock calls: The Nightbook (slub press) and Poppy (Carcanet) came out in 2022.