When the land is on its knees
And it seems like pickle and cheese
Laid out in slabs and chunks
All along the coast of the seas
And the sky is striking blue
As a thunderbolt in a bucket or two
Emptied in, the repository of wind
Which takes it hurling up the channel
And after the storm
The white windmills clearly blew
Like the arms of those reborn
On the hills of Calvary
Like jacks that God threw
Tumbling down
From the back of his hand
Fallen between divine fingers
The way across the bay
Seems so near yet is so far
The beach beyond out of reach abscond
The cream teas and fish and chips
The happy shoppers and laughing lips
The merry go round and carousel
The Big Top turning I know very well
The pier like a playground, for grown up kids
The steep climb to Brean Down
Where many a walking boot skids
And the fort which looks out back at us
Like a mirror seeing its own eye through binoculars
Its gun turrets and batteries and military shielding
Matched by our own battlements and the Victorian's building
Conjoined like three weird sisters Brean Down and two
islands
Steep Holm the steepest, its gradient highlands
Like a potters clay mound cut and turned
On the wheel of the sea
Its edges carved steep by is cupped hands
Flat Holm the lizard lounging down flat
Sunning itself, by the wind, ironed like a mat
Brean Down so colloquial, provincial almost
With Weston the hub of local stage post
And Cardiff is there gleaming and white
Shining out through defiance against the storm’s might
Metropolitan and buzzing splashing its wealth
Like an elephant in a mud bath all over itself
On the hill Penarth
Proud and self-fulfilled,
Looking on the works of former days willed
Collated like a kaleidoscope
The world swirls around
As a lesser black-backed gull
Swoops down to ground
