I can see here the curvature and compass
of the world. From the embankment that
separates the enclosed, salt-water Marina –
crowded today with summer holiday
novice canoeists – from the Dee Estuary,
I can see, east, a hundred metres away,
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 into the green Clwydian Hills,
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.