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.