SPOILS OF WAR
For more than eighty years the wind, the blown sand,
the salty air, and the high tides have softened
the geometrical edges of brick,
and concrete, and cut stone – detritus
of the eighteen-month long Liverpool Blitz
of nightly sirens, fires, and devastation,
removed, lorryload after lorryload,
for the maintenance of morale, from the
maritime city’s mercantile centre,
and dumped, just beyond the mouth
of the Mersey’s broad estuary,
on the beach between Crosby and Blundellsands,
that faces south-west across the shipping lanes
of Liverpool Bay towards North Wales,
Ireland, the Azores – imperceptibly
becoming again merely the minerals
they were made from, dispersing speck by speck
far into the oceans.
Jeff
March 4, 2025Lovely, David! …. Everything we are and were becomes gritstone and sandstone in the end, along with our experiences, dreams and aspirations, milled back into its constituent gravel and laid thin to eventually become another strata of subtle colour. Who knows, in a million years one layer may be split apart to reveal the word ‘Tesco’ on a very thin sheet of what they may decide to call ‘plastic’. (Other supermarkets exist).