Simon Armitage. British. B 1963

Simon Armitage is a Yorkshireman, with a northern feel for language and image. He is down to earth without being dull, concrete, without being heavy. This poem is from the collection The Universal Home Doctor, published by Faber (UK) in 2002.

THE STONE BEACH

A walk, not more than a mile,
along the barricade of land
between the ocean and the grey lagoon.
Six of us, hand in hand,

Connected by blood. Underfoot
a billion stones and pebbles -
new potatoes, mint imperials,
the eggs of birds -

Each rock more infinitely formed
than anything we own.
Spoilt for choice - which one to throw,
which one to pocket and take home.

The present tense, although
some angle of the sun, some slant of light
back-dates us thirty years.
Home movie. Super 8.

Seaweed in ropes and rags.
The weightless, empty armour
of a crab. A jawbone, bleached
and blasted, manages a smile.

Long-shore drift,
the ocean sorts and sifts,
giving with this, getting back
with the next.

A sailboat thinks itself
across the bay.
Susan, nursing a thought of her own,
unthreads and threads.

The middle button of her coat.
Disturbed,
a colony of nesting terns
makes one full circle of the world

then drops.
But the beach, full of itself,
each round of rock
no smaller than a bottle top,

no bigger than a nephew's fist.
One minute more, as Jonathan, three, autistic,
hypnotised by flight and fall
picks one more shape

and, underarms the last wish of the day -
look, like a stone - into the next wave.