“On Harlech Beach” by Anne Stevenson
Sharpen your eyes looking back from the tide’s headland,
and the Lowry figures on the beach could be movable type-
a “p,” pink, “i” indigo, an “x” running yellow and tan
in pursuit of a flying stop. What an alphabet soup
the bay makes of them, these large fathered families
downloading their daughters and sons, sans serif and
sans grief on the centerfold page of the sand.
…
From which a Welsh double “l” is detaching itself -
lovers, hand-linked by a hyphen, weaving with ease
through the ins and outs of the waves’ parentheses.
From a distance how simple they look, how picturesque.
Three dots (an ellipsis in action) rush back and forth-
terriers seeking, retrieving, time-free and carefree
as only dogs in illiterate joyousness can be.
…
It’s a scene to write about. You could walk back
cheering- if not for the human story, for the display
it offers to the pattern-hungry eye-
the body sway of the lovers, a Frisbee caught
by a bronze torso, striped pigments of cloud and sky
brushed by an appearing, disappearing sun;
prone golden mums and their lucky cartwheeling young.
…
As if this were a playground raised from the dead for them,
the salvaged remains of old beachheads, suffered and won.
Unremarked by the holiday crowd, two faraway swarms-
I would paint them as shadows in khaki and bloodstained brown-
turn out to be birds; an invasion of scavenging “m”s
whose squabble of laughter is raucous enough to drown
those boys shouting “King of the castle” as they kick it down.
