Author: writingatthebeachhut

Hebridean Seaweed Soup

Sea Whistle? A broth of Dead Man’s Rope?
A fusion of Fucus flavours:
Bladderwrack, Spiral Wrack, Channelled Wrack?

Or perhaps a mash of Devil’s Apron/
bulbous prongs of Velvet Horn?
Something named only in Gaelic, with a little garlic?
Each summer evening, after a long Atlantic swim
(no skins), I cook and try the day’s find,
ranging ever further out onto rarely visited skerries of taste.

Bruach Mhor

An earlier version has been previously published by Ekphrastic Review.

Bruach Mhor lives by a loch, is transitioning into a seal, tries to walk mindfully. His poems have most recently appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Re-Side, Morphrog, The Broken Spine Artists Collective, Plumwood Mountain, Poetry Village, Emerald (Monstrous Regiment). He tweets as @dolphins_two

Photo credit @wolfgang_hasslemann at http://www.unsplash.com

BALTIMORE, COUNTY CORK

That day,
sky, mountains, cliffs and glorious wind-swept air.

How could I not dance?
Dance among sea pinks and spongy grasses.

Climb sheer rugged rocks.
‘To the Beacon,’ my friend called.

There, secure between two boulders, I looked down,
down on smoke-blue, sun-diamond sea.

Maureen Weldon

Previously published in Poetry Space Winter Showcase 2016, Edited by Johanna Boal

Maureen Weldon is Irish. 2014 represented Wales at Ukraine’s Terra Poetica. Her poetry has been widely published, including Crannog, Poetry Scotland, Open Mouse, Vsesvit, Ink Sweat & Tears. She has published five chapbooks, latest, 2014 ‘Midnight Robin’ Poetry Space Ltd. Now hugely looking forward to her Red Squirrel Press Pamphlet in 2020

Photo credit @bumbleandmoss http://www.tinamedwardswriter.com

Comino

One hill of a rock worried with holes
and margined with turquoise sea.

One crusty cheese, a brie perhaps, pecked at,
punctuated with moulds of olive and grey.

One infant between its mother Gozo
and its father Malta:

one Comino (cumin seed), a dry child
holding its head above water,

one at peace in the smell of its own skin –
baby skin, limestone – upper coralline,

one sedimentary compaction that whispers
and waves to ferry boats too grand to call.

Graham Burchell

Graham Burchell lives in Devon and has four published collections. He is a 2013 Hawthornden Fellow, winner of the 2015 Stanza competition, runner up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2016, a 3rd prize winner in the 2017 Bridport Prize, a poem highly commended in the 2018 Forward prize for best single poem. He is one of five that organises the Teignmouth Poetry Festival.

http://www.poetryteignmouth.com/festival-2020.html

Photo credit @egle_sidaraviciute at http://www.unsplash.com

Tuscan Sea Scenes

The Caribbean white sands of Vada
have lost their spring banks of seaweed.
Fishing lines and tattered plastic lace
mingle with towels and migrant men
patrolling and selling, wave after wave.

In Rosignano Solvay
the factory with its pluming towers
releases bi-carbonate waste
into turquoise sea.
Tuscan town and village life survives.

In Pomaia red-robed buddhist monks
meditate, watching fields
roll down to a distant milky sea.
The lowering sun anoints it with gold
in defiance of fading light.

From the Castellina hills
a fiery mushroom cloud sunset,
barely disturbs the slate sea.

Jenny Robb

Jenny lives in Liverpool and has been writing poetry since her teens but only seriously since retiring. She is an ex social worker/NHS worker. She loves Italy and visits as often as possible. She has poems in The Morning Star, in a forthcoming George Eliot anthology, (Yaffle Press), and in the next issue of Nightingale and Sparrow literary magazine. She tweets @jirobb

Photo credit @m_d_adventures at http://www.unsplash.com

Sea Salt Breath

The closer I grow
to the land of sand,
the unmistakable

scent of salty air;
natural, cleansing, freshness.
Each breath of serenity

fills my lungs and mind;
old pains swept away
straight out to sea.

I know they’ll be
sent back to me;
waves come and go.

But my home is the shore
on the edge
of blue eternity.

Ryan Dodge

Ryan Dodge is a writer of poetry and fiction, currently living in Los Angeles. When not writing, he is printing letterpress at Iron Curtain Press, enjoying the married life, and talking to his cats like they’re children. He has previously been published in The Dawntreader, Penwood Review and Chantwood Magazine.

He tweets @ryandodgewrites

https://ryandodge23.wixsite.com/writing

Photo credit @solamander at http://www.unsplash.com

The wading bird

When I think of bitterns, I’m sad
I haven’t seen one

since that time I mucked out
the horse paddocks. I was 12.

It lived in the boundary ditch.
I don’t think it looked at me

but I studied it
for quite some time.

Long neck, the most striking thing
feathers dappled brown

beak pointed upwards, gullet
exposed to the sky

as if frozen, perhaps it knew
I was there after all. That day

it was warm, the zephyrs carried
the dusty smell of horses.

I never saw it again
but when certain people say

a bittern’s been sighted along the track
or at the end of another estuary

I take longer to walk that way,
staring over the bank to the settlers’ shore

where steam engines used to blow
and wonder if it’s hiding

or camouflaged in the brown reeds
because I don’t want to die

without seeing another bittern
booming to the breeze.

Gail Ingram

Gail Ingram writes and lives in Christchurch, NZ. She is the author of Contents Under Pressure (2019 Pūkeko Publications). Her poetry has been widely published and anthologized. In 2019 she won the Caselberg International Poetry Prize. She was also the winner of NZPS International Poetry Competition 2016. She is a poetry editor for takahē magazine and a short fiction editor for Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction. More at https://www.theseventhletter.nz/

Photo credit @ https://www.norfolk-norwich.com/news/spotting-the-elusive-bittern-in-norfolk.php