WEST KIRBY, WIRRAL
Standing on the embankment that separates
the Marine Lake from the Dee Estuary
I can see the world’s curvature and compass:
east, over the lake, a hundred yards away,
is The Promenade; south – beyond the dinghies
moored midstream, their halyards tinkling
in the steady breeze – the white cooling towers
and the cable-stayed bridge at Connah’s Quay;
west, Flintshire’s industrial shore rising
steeply to become Halkyn Mountain,
where a fire has begun in the gorse
and the bracken on Holywell Common;
north west, Hilbre, island of erstwhile
pilgrimage then commerce; north – beneath
the horizon where ships wait for high tide
to cross the Liverpool Bar – West Kirby’s beach,
stretching into a mile of sand flats that ends
where the distant waves break ashen and silent.
Note: This is a revised version of the piece first published on the site in August 2013. I have taken in the last year or so – encouraged by Sylvia Selzer – to reading poems about places aloud in situ. Reading this one aloud on West Kirby prom made clear the original’s infelicities of syntax – and three factual errors.