A Sudden Ending

Sea-Side Poem

At a grey side by the blank sea,
at seven, I sighed for all the hungry children
as they swept like earthen dreams
across the sand, consumptive and alive.

In my successive views of time gone by,
I saw them grow to be the scientists
and politicians, the lovers and the lost
amongst the proles of nineteen-eighty-four.

I have some hope, some little light of saviour
in the distance, life between the blackened end
of civilising cities. The enemies of green are dead
and danced upon by trees and other ghosts.

Behind the gorse, the lovers couple guiltily alone,
detach, unstick and drink their plastic water,
drop plates upon the grass, decadently rise
and brush their clothes of insects and of other dust.

High, bright windows shone at us when children;
told us of the happy life of music in those houses
where the girls stepped daintily and smiled at us,
a joke we thought uncivilised and cruel.

And the long hair shone in sunlight through the trees,
the brightest laugh called to us once again,
and we missed the kisses through the rain.
We sighed, delayed the poetry and learned of irony.

Melting in the manufactured summer, we read
and built our plastic models with the care of children,
painted them and re-enacted ancient wars.
VE Day was nineteen the year that I was born.

The war ended suddenly.