AEGEAN SUNSET

The Zenith

Sunlight shimmers on swelling wavelets

Down through to the sand-bed below

Where it pulses like sparkling veins

Deep in the high life;

And we are in our element:

Swimming with glinting sardines and distant sails

Whilst bodies brown on rocks and beaches

Where cicadas whirr continuously in the green cliff

As they have since time began,

On this island

To which we have now returned.

The Blueness

Pure azure

By late afternoon,

The blueness has emerged

Infinitetisimally:

A slow water-colour evolving

In the faraway hills of the bay.

Greens, browns and yellows

Of trees, soil and beach

Coalesce in tones of blue,

Dissolving down from the sky,

Rising up from the sea.

The sun, still high, fringes the horizon

With a brilliance about to send bright scintillas

Sailing towards us.

The Shimmering

Now the sky, hills and sea merge

Into the blueness,

And a glittering spire of sunlight

Advances on the lambent water,

Flashing instants and breaking on the shore at our feet

Like seconds in the golden grains of ancient time.

The Dazzling

Down through the ages,

Romans, Turks and Venetians

Have watched this same shimmering

That we see now,

Turn to dazzle

On the sea between these shores,

And the point of this spire

That touches our toes

Now, in this lazy, hazy present

Touched others long past:

Always the same and always different,

Now and then,

Here and gone,

Always one.

The Afterglow

Molten gold,

The sun sinks to the crest of distant hills

And the moon rises silver behind us.

The last of the dazzling draws us in

To slip like snakes

Into the liquid silk of still sea.

We silhouette our way

Far out,

Into the twinkling heart of the dazzle

As the sun, its spire built,

Burns down behind the blue hills

Where a small, solitary cloud darkens and dispels.

In the afterglow burnishing the sea,

An aurora appears

From great unseen lanterns of gentle gods,

Briefly dawning the dusk,

And we glide back

To our deserted beach,

Naked and new

In the moonlit night.

(2005)

We’ve been to the Greek island of Skiathos a number of times and lain on our favourite beach, swimming, dozing and reading as the light changes through the day (that’s the actual view in the photo). I started this poem on the inside covers of a paperback edition of William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ which I was re-reading at the time. Perhaps the sun-drenched hedonism of the poem acted as an antidote to the dark horror of the story.

It took me another visit to the island and a couple more attempts to finish the poem. Although it doesn’t have a regular structure or a rhyme-scheme, ‘AS’ is the sort of poem that demands every word should be in the right place and every line be the right length. Coleridge said that if the definition of prose was the putting of words in the right order then poetry should be ‘the best words in the best order’.

That's the actual sunset on the actual beach with the actual Lisa in silhouette.