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From 'What Follows?' by Patrick Ingram
Where the Young Girl, Blonde and Autistic, in her Pink Anorak,
Wades into the Sea, Laughing and Talking Quietly to Herself
Devon pebbles, under the chuckling stream water,
Fresh water streaming down into the sea
Across the sand and pebbles, in all their gemmy
And quartzy granularity, each pebble its own lifetime,
An entire mystery of creation, formation and
Obliteration. Naming the pebbles in the fresh
Water stream, under St Werburgh’s church,
The blood in the snow, frog’s back, the crow’s eye,
Blood in mud, sugared sand, ice in peas,
These the pebbles’ names tumbling together in the
Crystal stream that falls round St Werburgh’s church
In its circular enclosure, circular because of its
Ancient heritage
And dignified by a royal dedication, to the
Patroness of Ely, dignifying the sands where
Common dogs bound into black rockpools and chase
Each other’s tails, looking sideways before sprinting
After wet balls and sticks thrown by shouting kids.
And look up there,
Kites hold high to the air, lofted by the stares of squinting
Fliers, fingering and spinning the twine, the string
A thread of intentionality and lost purpose,
Stretched over the Devon pebbles in their five coloured
Beauty, rolling, pebbling, down to the sea through sand
That’s carved in fractals of the great estuary
By fresh stream water
Slicing in glassy sections from the opening between
The hips and upper thighs of St Werburgh’s inlet,
Butted by the Great Mew Stone whose
Slanted cliff threatens ritual death by casting down
Onto disjointed rocks,
Your corpse a fleeting colouring of Devon pebbles,
A brooch, on the velvet and tweed of hillside,
Hedge and moor, all restless, made changeable,
By the inhospitable, all powerful sea. What fears
These pebbles know? Great terrors like the
Snake the children scrape, for twenty yards, and stud
With red and red-earth pebbles, bejewelling its eyes and
Spines, in the sand, coiling out towards the sea along
The quick fresh water stream.
What fears lie in the black kelp and rack and
Among the rough edged rockpools harbouring
Limpets and barnacled jewellery and biting creatures
Under the unfaithful cliffs, under Werburgh’s royal stare,
Out towards the elderly surfers making time
Turn tricks in their imagination and their limbs
Swell back with youth, vitality and knowledgelessness
Unlike the all too knowing sand bar, a thin white
Bead of foam, threatening wrecking, hovelling and
The beat of a cosh down on a drowning head as the
Cargo drifts free into the wrecker’s breadless hand.
Fear, a Devon pebble, rattling, gravelling in the stream bed,
The chuckling flow of life across the purple, yellow,
Strand of circumstance, weather, politics and cash,
Coursing into bitter water, colourless, towards the sea,
Studding sand with Devon pebbles,
Rounded jewels and glinting stones
Met with an unspeakable amazement.
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