Why are we so hopelessly devoted to the sea?
Frieda Hughes finds herself dreaming of the ocean as she thinks about another poet and artist who was similarly enamoured with the coast
THE MONTGOMERY LIT FEST
These hours of flaming June have mustered themselves
Beneath wrung-out rainclouds to blaze
Only in the blue spaces, perhaps twice on a fortunate Sunday
When motorbikes accumulate on the roads to the coast,
Their engines exchanging cubic centimetres and velocity
In the atmosphere, so that I can hear what goes by
Beyond the small world in which I am less mobile
Than in a Covid lockdown. Almost half-way to junking
Leg brace and crutches, the idea of escape hangs in the air
Like the smell of gunpowder, beckoning risks and errors.
I have developed the patience of stairs at a limp,
And have my eye on the exit beyond the purple acers
As I read about a woman called ‘Ray’, whose art
Will anchor my interview in the Town Hall on Saturday
With the man who has many paged her in glossy hardback.
Re-formed from the colours of her thousand painted skies,
Her peopled drawings and the boulders of her many beaches,
Her title is a line from her poems, because no matter her illness,
War, the endings of love, or the depth of her pitfalls,
Her coastal devotion meant her hand was ‘the voice of the sea’.
Ray Howard-Jones: My Hand Is The Voice Of The Sea. By David Moore.