February Beach
It’s a toe-stumble over the beach-top rocks.
Dry sand blows in low veils, the sea’s
withdrawn into a horizon mutter.
‘It’s not what it was’ said the old lady
who once ran the beach café,
‘not what it was’. Her old hut burned down,
now rebuilt in heritage stone. Sells
cheese toasties and plastic pasties.
No more genteel china cups and cakes.
A sudden transverse dog gallops,
here-and-gone, with ecstatic pant
brown eyes fixed on phantom prey.
Yesterday’s churned sand swept clean
by the morning tide, an unmarked distance
for filling, and for erasing.
Ruth Aylett lives and works in Edinburgh and her poetry is widely published in magazines, both in print and online, and anthologies. She has been known to read her work with a robot. Her pamphlets Pretty in Pink (4Word) and Queen of Infinite Space (Maytree) were published in 2021. For more see https://ruthaylett.org
Black Nore Review 