The front page of Brexit Day’s Forgers’ Gazette
was a photo of the White Cliffs of Dover
with ‘A NEW DAWN FOR BRITAIN’ superimposed
on the blue sky above – and the sun, by chance,
highlighting the erosion of the chalk,
ephemeral and flaky as metaphor.
***
After the war, when things were in short supply,
and we had drawing, occasionally,
I drew a layered landscape with wax crayons:
blue sky with bird and cloud, bright green grass,
and high, white cliffs, and a black caravan,
where the stony beach and the chalk bluff met.
I imagined myself inside. My father
was lost in the war, my mother bereft.
I stroked the sugar paper into dreams.
***
Today, out of a bright sky, a northerly
is rushing, thundering through this copse
of larch and spruce. Among the trees camellias,
with their lustrous leaves, are beginning to bloom,
the colours rich amid the conifers.
The wind, through this stand of evergreens,
is almost louder than the roar of aircraft
overhead, coming into land nearby
with cargoes from France, stockpiling as for war.
By David Selzer