Like Eden?

It was grey and misty today, and sometimes downright wet, so I pottered around making sourdough bread (it's still in the making) and writing a bit. However, we might as well be dog-owners with our compulsion to get out, so in the very late afternoon we took as level a walk as we could find (for my knee!) and headed down the shore road. People may be rioting in London, protesting in the cities - but here, it still feels like a ghost town. Maybe it always does at teatime ...

But the sense that there are very few people about is intensified by the abundance of growth everywhere, from the huge front lawn of a hotel on the prom that is now a field, tossing with the seed-heads of a variety of grasses, to the shore itself, with wild mustard sprouting along the edges of the promenade and this wonderful garden that I've remarked on already, growing daily more lush and colourful between the road and the shoreline where only the geese and gulls congregate. 

Walking here far more often than usual - I could count on my fingers the number of times before lockdown began - I find myself noticing these uncared-for stretches and wondering at their sheer exuberance. Perhaps Eden was like this?

I wrote this today:

Locked down

And there were days that drifted by
as quiet as wrack on the grey sea,
becalmed on tireless ebbs and flows -
a rootless journey to the end.
In other pools, in other seas, 
children grew and changed and did
the things unthinking children do
because their lives will never end -
not I. I see the distant shore
 - more clear with each diurnal surge - 
retreat until a new wind blows
when, busy with the helm and sail,
I fail to watch. The voyage ends
on that far coast we’ve always seen
and never known, and it is done.

C.M.M. 06/2020